Dragon, a game developer, has recently garnered some attention for a video of a game they have been developing: a that lets you snipe 📖at aggressive Pokemon with a rifle. And it looks, well, pretty darn rad. In their work-in-progress video, you can watch them blast several Pokemon with several well-placed shotgun bullets, taking down rampaging Pokemon, ranging from smaller ‘mons like Pikachu (which promptly keeled over after being shot) to Legendaries like Zapdops and Mewtwo. Unlike the bloodless Pokemon fighter Pokken, this Pokemon shooter is much more violent than that, even if not particularly gory; every gunshot is accompanied by a small eruption of blood from the Pokemꦫon. It’s completely antithetical to the peaceful, pastoral atmosphere of the Pokemon series—and it’s incredibly refreshing. What could be up next? A Pokemon-themed cooking show where you can make Magikarp broth and whip up Tauros steak?
The comments on Dragon’s video mostly revolve around Nintendo and their litigious tendencies, however. Nintendo is 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:famously protective over its intellectual properties, and Dragon has stated in a behind-the scenes video that they weren’t planning to sell this game, while adding in a wry remark to Nintendo lawyers to please not take their video down. And as luck would have it, these videos have since been taken down due to copyright claims (Reddit’s probably the only place you can for now). Bꦫut there are also just as many people who have pondered about the point of fan games—why rely on another brand’s existing IP and risk violating copyright laws, rather than create your own original characters?
The answer, of course, isn’t about laziness or an inclination to piggyback on a more popular series to make their games stand out. F𓄧or many fan creators, making fan games is like an incubator of sorts, with these games becoming a means of honing their programming skills and discovering more about game design through more established titles. “I decided I wanted to practice a little bit of programming, so I downloaded GameMaker and did a couple of mini-games here and there just to learn a little bit of how game logic and design are done,” said Milton Guasti, the developer behind the Metroid 2 remake fangame (AM2R) in an . Instead of developing a brand new title altogether from scratch, many budding—and cash-stꦰrapped—game developers may find modding an existing game much cheaper to pull off, and this can stem in a variety of ways: using pre-existing tools that came with the original game, or using other freely available, third party tools like .
Some older games even have had their source code released and made available even by their own developers, such as the first Doom game—which saw a litany of being created in their wake. Another way is by amending the ROM images of older games; is one such example, and is a popular fan remake 🍸of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. This was how Toby Fox of Undertale fame was able to cut his teeth in his initial years as a developer; he was making and several older role-playing games.
Despite the hazy legality issues around them, fan games are an integral part of the games ecosystem. For one thing, they sustain fan interest around older games—one such example is the , a franchise th♊at was largely overlooked by Nintendo. In this curious instance, creators aren’t issued DMCA takedowns rampantly because of a particular distinction: rights to the existing games belong to Nintendo, the rights to Mother belong to its original creator, Shigesato Itoi. Since its release, the series’ popularity has barely waned, and there looks to be fan —and hopefully releas💦ed eventually—by developers. Then there’s Earthbound’s Nessa (Earthbound being the Western release of the second Mother game), whose appearance in the Super Smash Bros series may just be attributed to Mother’s continued popularity.
At the same time, fan games also have the capacity to enrich the original game’s vision, particularly for players who hunger for something beyond what’s already released and presented. That can, perhaps, be a boundary-pushing version of the game that presents an alternative reality (like a first-person shooter about hunting down bloodthirsty Pokemon, because isn’t the whole idea of running into an electric mouse that can zap you somewhat terrifying?), or one that even answers speculative questions about the oddest bits of the game’s narrative or setting (such as whether Pokemon, when encountered in the wild, are naturally inclined to be hostile to humans). 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Five Nights at Freddy’s has a that greatly elevates the experience♐ of the original gam𒁃e, with games that allow players to explore alternative perspectives and genres based on the horror title. Then there are open source games such as Friday Night Funkin, which even encourages players to tweak the levels, or even create their own version of the rhythm game. This saw the game’s popularity soar, which eventually culminated in a campaign.that has the developers raising $2,247,641 for a “full-ass” version of the game.
Of course, there are also a host of fan games that eventually become huge successes in their own right, such as Black Mesa, a thoughtful third-party remake of the original Half Life, and Castlevania: Simon’s Destiny, a Doom mod that lets you play the Castlevania classic in the first-person perspective. More than these are the countless fan games you can find on sit🍬es like Game Jolt and itch.io; a cursory search has already revealed a couple of games created as a homage to several franchises, including Pokemon Destiny, an open-world Pokemon game that seems to be no longer in active development.
The question now, then, is whether fan games can continue to thrive in the games industry—or specifically, that of Nintendo’s fan games at the moment, with the company🍎’s overprotectiveness seeming like the exception to the rule. Most studios seem to be largely okay with fan games. Take Installation 01, a Halo fan game, which was given explicit permission by 343 Industries and Microsoft to proceed, as long as the game remained “”. At the same time, Mother’s creator, , seemed perfectly okay with fans creating their own sequels to Mother 3, which has seen numerous fan games and unofficial sequels being developed.
For now, Nintendo fans looking to create fan games inspired by the studio’s nume🀅rous franchises may find skirting the long arms of their lawyers a mounting challenge. Even though this still prob🍬ably wouldn’t stop the cadres of aspiring game developers from attempting to do so, anyway—and they shouldn’t, for the gaming landscape would look dramatically different without their efforts—it means that these games have to be produced away from the ever-prying eyes of zealous attorneys. And for many fan game developers, this will only become an even longer and more solitary route; one that will only exacerbate the already punishing reality of games development.
As for Dragon, he has since that he will still continue development on the game, but will remove all the𒊎 Pokemon and “add a bunch of new surprises”.