Nintendo goes after Game & Watch hacking videos with copyright claims



After hacking Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. edition Game & Watch, showing how to do so, and even getting other games to run on it--DOOM among them, YouTuber stacksmashing has found some of their tutorials removed from the site. Two of the user's videos involving hacking the system were taken down from YouTube via copyright claims from Nintendo. Stacksmashing decided to fire back at Nintendo, by disputing the claims, and in the meantime, uploading highly edited video where he pokes fun at the company for going after his content. He plans to re-upload the removed videos in the future by blurring out any official gameplay footage, which according to the copyright claim, is the "reason" they were taken down.

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MarkDarkness

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Nintendo corporate management has become complete scum since Iwata passed away. It was never that friendly, but they keep digging further down.
 

osaka35

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so in general you cant resell cause it contains -gasp- roms stock
lol technically true, but nintendo sanctioned. license for those roms are bound to the hardware and advertised as such, which makes it hard to argue you're distributing software without the license to do so. copyright is weird.
 
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driverdis

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What is interesting about them taking these videos down is that this is an involved hack that requires someone to open up and solder connections to their system. The average joe is not going to do this at all, whereas some non techie people did the SNES Classic mods since it was just a usb cable and some software that made it easy.
 

orangy57

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it's funny that the US has made all of this tech modification legal yet Nintendo's still trying and succeeding to take stuff like this down. The Game & Watch handheld literally can't even connect to the internet, so what does Nintendo have to lose by letting people using the device that they've bought. This is so anti-consumer that Nintendo taking the video down is probably hurting them since nobody wants to buy the 50 dollar handheld that can only run 1 video game from 35 years ago.
 
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Xzi

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You know what I did? So Nintendo is having an eShop sale, so I bought two third party games for a total of 17 bucks. Why? Because I refuse to buy first party games. Screw em.
Sorry to have to break it to you, but Nintendo takes a 30% cut of anything sold on the eShop. :D
 
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Randy Steele

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Assholes should've made a competent product and people wouldn't have had to hack it. Like maybe adding a bunch of Game and watch games rather than another copy of the same old boring SMB. This is exactly why I unashamedly pirate nintendo games.
 

DerpDingus

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Here I am with my 8 various portable emulating handhelds having a great time tinkering with the software and playing 1000's of pirated NES and other various games and laughing at the sorry excuse of a game library on the Nintendo Switch online service. Dont get me wrong I still have it, but its useless to me.
 

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I still don't even know what the outstanding qualities that this device was supposed to exhibit, to venture off topic for a second. It has only two buttons, is riding on an important, but otherwise kind of obscure to your casual consumer brand name, and I could name plenty of other handhelds that could play more games than this that also only have two buttons.

It's still a cool display piece on a shelf, I guess.
 
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Xzi

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I still don't even know what the outstanding qualities that this device was supposed to exhibit, to venture off topic for a second. It has only two buttons, is riding on an important, but otherwise kind of obscure to your casual consumer brand name, and I could name plenty of other handhelds that could play more games than this that also only have two buttons.
Nostalgia and/or collector's value, that's it. $15 of the price is for the device itself, and the other $40ish is just for name recognition.
 

Silent_Gunner

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Nostalgia and/or collector's value, that's it. $15 of the price is for the device itself, and the other $40ish is just for name recognition.

I find this obsession with nostalgia to be a train whose tracks are coming to an end. I used to work at a Walmart, and they had, like, an entire section dedicated to various flashback devices like they saw what the NES/SNES mini were doing and decided to recreate that.

The problem with ALL of these flashback/mini console products is that they're all for devices for which you could play on any device nowadays that isn't a RPi1 or Zero. All of those 16-bit systems can be emulated just fine or close to full speed on systems going as far back as the PSP. Sure, the SNES emulation is shakier than a lot of other devices, but it's still close enough to full speed to be relatively comparable.

I know, there's a ton of arguments for these systems and their existence, be it their ease of use, the fact that it comes with games built-in, nostalgia, and people not wanting to resort to piracy to play some games that are "SEALED MINT CONDITION RARE!!!!!" bait on eBay, or games that are just priced really high due to people not wanting to part with them. (ALttP and Super Metroid cartridge can still go for a lot on eBay)
 
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After hacking Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. edition Game & Watch, showing how to do so, and even getting other games to run on it--DOOM among them, YouTuber stacksmashing has found some of their tutorials removed from the site. Two of the user's videos involving hacking the system were taken down from YouTube via copyright claims from Nintendo. Stacksmashing decided to fire back at Nintendo, by disputing the claims, and in the meantime, uploading highly edited video where he pokes fun at the company for going after his content. He plans to re-upload the removed videos in the future by blurring out any official gameplay footage, which according to the copyright claim, is the "reason" they were taken down.

:arrow: Source



Im not surprised anymore
 

RedBlueGreen

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LMAO at least the guy is taking in stride. This and the music takedowns are way beyond the pale. Nintendo's legal team needs to pull the sticks out of their asses.


Yeah, I'm not sure it's worth the price even with all the features you can unlock by hacking it. I mean, you can get a Wii for less than that.
It's only worth it if you got it as a collectors item like I did. I plan to just put the Nintendo IP NES and GB(C) games on it, then everything else will go on my Bittboy S30. At the very least their cheap asses could've put on the USA Super Mario Bros. 2 and Super Mario Bros 3 for the price.
 

chrisrlink

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lol technically true, but nintendo sanctioned. license for those roms are bound to the hardware and advertised as such, which makes it hard to argue you're distributing software without the license to do so. copyright is weird.
well its illegal to resell/rent in japan and they tried to push the ban here in the 90's so maybe that was their intent to use roms in the first place
 

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