Nintendo is speedrunning the Disney playbook. We all know where that goes.
We’re experiencing a golden age of Nintendo…’s legal bloodhounds. Seriously, these days I hear more about Nintendo’s latest target of annihilation than Nintendo’s latest videogames. That’s partly because the console giant’s recent output has mostly been a forgettable roster of late-generation call-ups like «a Zelda spinoff» and «more Mario Party», but it’s also because Nintendo’s public persona has gotten pretty ugly.
Beyond that one month that we were all really into Tears of the Kingdom, the story of Nintendo lately is one of picking fights or (more commonly) threatening to sue its own fans so hard that they don’t even dare fight back. The decimation of the Ryujinx emulator and a potentially risky Palworld lawsuit are making headlines everywhere, but taking stock of just the past couple of years revealed a bunch of Nintendo legal actions that I totally forgot about.
Between late 2022 and 2024, Nintendo:
Went after a PC application that assigns box art to your non-Steam games because it had Nintendo art in its database
Barraged a YouTuber/modder with copyright strikes and threats until he took down a Breath of the Wild multiplayer mod
Blocked the release of the Dolphin emulator on Steam by warning Valve it’d come after them next
Indirectly killed a cool Portal 64 demake in development for genuine N64 hardware: Amazingly, Valve nipped this one in the bud not because of the Portal usage, but because it didn’t want to deal with the inevitable Nintendo fallout.
DMCA’d a Palworld Pokémon mod off the internet as the game was blowing up (months before the patent suit)
Sued the developers of the Yuzu Switch emulator, killed the project, and settled for millions of dollars before a judge could decide if there is anything illegal about Yuzu
Killed the Citra 3DS emulator, made by the same Yuzu group, in the fallout
Nuked 20 years’ worth of Nintendo-related Garry’s Mod creations from orbit (because why not)
Formally filed a patent lawsuit against Palworld
Sicced the dogs on the last Switch emulator standing, Ryujinx
It’s worth saying out loud that this is not normal, even for videogame company standards.
