Remember last week, when Mario Royale was a thing? If you don't, it was a 100-player battle royale-style game based on Super Mario Bros. One hundred players raced each other to be the first to finish one of three stages. It was a beautiful dream, but it was doomed to fail.
As expected, Nintendo slapped the project with a DMCA takedown notice. This notice informs a company or web host that they're hosting material which infringes on copyright. Nintendo is pretty eager with its DMCA notices, so it was only a matter of time before Mario Royale's demise. Fear not, though: the project is back with a new tongue-in-cheek name. DMCA Royale takes the basic gameplay of Mario Royale but uses assets that won't upset lawyers.
https://twitter.com/Inferbro/status/1142163384726675456
The Version 2.0.0 patch notes for DMCA Royale simply read "Fuck. It happened. Please bear with us while we fix the game over the next few days." Version 2.0.1 updates the game to DMCA Royale and changes the main characters' names to "Infringio Infringio" and "Copyright Infringio". This version also adds assets "recreated by seal team six" including sprites, sound effects, music, and maps. There's a new kid-friendly mode which removes all text from the game's world, and you can now use the gamepad's A button to launch the game. Other than that, it's still the same frantic dash to reach the end of a stage. There are 75 players now instead of 100 for performance issue reasons, but the gameplay is largely unchanged.
It must be said that the new DMCA Royale assets do still look quite similar to Super Mario Bros. If Nintendo really wanted to take this down, they probably still could. The Mario reskin doesn't appear to have taken away any of the game's appeal. At the time of writing, there are 963 players online. Hopefully, Nintendo will leave well alone from this project now and we can all enjoy the madness that is Mario - sorry, DMCA Royale.
How do you feel about Mario Royale being hit with a DMCA takedown notice? Let us know in the comments below!
