Homebrew Commodore 64 port of Super Mario Bros. gets taken down by Nintendo
It's no secret that Nintendo has always been very protective torwards their IPs: time and time again we've seen the company go against ROM hackers, content creators, modders and fan projects alike. While some people argue that what they're doing is legitimate or even deserved, as said teams or individuals are using their characters and brands (or even game assets at times) without permission, it's also true what they're doing is not well-seen by many members of the broader gaming community. Today, it looks like another fan project has been added to the list of takedowns issued by the nipponic company.
The ingeniously named Super Mario Bros. 64 (not to be confused with the officially released Nintendo 64 game, Super Mario 64) was a homebrew Commodore 64 port of the original Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The port has been made by the developer ZeroPaige and took seven long years of work before it would see the light of day. Once released online on the April 18th of the current year, it immediately caught the C64 scene's eyes due to its technical impressiveness.
However, the cheers wouldn't last long: the download links started to get progressively removed and, later in the day, a tweet by Commodore Computer Club has revealed that a DMCA takedown notice forced them to remove their own download link to the ROM as well.
Failed to fetch tweet https://twitter.com/c64club/status/1120463081908391936
As a result, not even a few days after its release, ZeroPaige's remarkable homebrew port has effectively disappeared from the many C64 enthusiast websites out there. For the curious readers, a few gameplay videos have been recorded and can be found on YouTube. The ROM, however, is nowhere to be found on the usual places and will probably keep being spread by people who were lucky enough to grab it in time, like many projects before it.
Source 1 (CSDB) Source 2 (Commodore Computer Club)
