With the release of Game Builder Garage, Nintendo is finally embracing fan games…kind of.
The new game development tool aims to teach Nintendo fans how to make their own games,
and many commenters have taken this as a challenge: if Nintendo won’t make a new
F-Zero or Earthbound or Kid Icarus game, they’ll just use Game Builder Garage to do it themselves.
So why is Nintendo effectively handing fans the tools necessary to create their own Nintendo
fan games? After all, Labo VR Garage has already proven that when given a Nintendo
development tool, the first thing fans will do is try to recreate Mario levels.
The company has earned a reputation for being more than a little aggressive when
it comes to unauthorised fan games. Fan works, Satoru Iwata once said, “diminish the dignity”
of the Nintendo brand overall. Earlier this year, for example,
Nintendo ordered GameJolt to take down 379 fan games which the company argued infringed
upon their intellectual property. According to Nintendo’s legal team:
“[Game Jolt fan games] display images of Nintendo's video game characters in
connection with unauthorized online games that copy the characters, music, and other
features of Nintendo's video games. The web site at gamejolt.com generates revenue from advertising
banners displayed on the site and advertisements played while users wait for the games to load.”
This may sound familiar to many YouTubers – it’s a similar justification that Nintendo initially
used to prevent gameplay footage being used on monetized videos. In 2013, when Nintendo began
using the Content ID system to claim advertising revenue for YouTube videos that feature
their games, the company said in a statement: “As part of our on-going push to ensure Nintendo
content is shared across social media channels in an appropriate and safe way, we became a YouTube
partner and as such in February 2013 we registered our copyright content in the YouTube database.
For most fan videos this will not result in any changes, however, for those videos featuring
Nintendo-owned content, such as images or audio of a certain length, adverts will now appear at the
beginning, next to or at the end of the clips.” Essentially, Nintendo doesn’t love when
other people make money from their games. To a certain extent, Game Builder Garage solves
this problem – fan game creators can now produce their games in a space that Nintendo controls,
so there’s no danger that anyone could make money from these projects apart from Nintendo.
However, this almost certainly isn’t the reason that Game Builder Garage was created.
The game represents a shift in the way that Nintendo’s developers – rather
than their legal team – have been approaching game design in recent years.
Back when the first Super Mario Maker was released, Shigeru Miyamoto made it clear
that the developers at Nintendo value creative play within all of their games.
He said: “I’ve always said that the fun of the games comes
to life when you as the player are using your own creativity to explore the levels and trying
out different things and seeing what happens. “So it’s really a game about creative play as
much as anything. This is sort of like the ultimate extension of that idea.
And in fact I used to joke that if kids would play Super Mario Bros. it would help make them smarter,
because it encourages their creativity, so this is the ultimate extension of that philosophy.”
In the years since the release of Mario Maker, Nintendo has been leaning into this creative play
more heavily – Nintendo Labo, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and even Bandai Namco’s New Pokemon Snap
all centre on creating a space in which players can express themselves and their creativity.
It seems that the developers at the company are eager to explore different forms of creative play,
even while the company’s legal team continues to restrict how creative players can actually be.
Nintendo’s legal team sees no problem with carefully curating games made with these kinds of
amateur game development tools. When the similar tool, Dreams, gained popularity on PlayStation
consoles last year, Nintendo was quick to contact Sony to demand the removal of all fan games which
featured Mario’s likeness. Said Sony:
“Sony Interactive Entertainment is notifying the affected users that an IP Infringement
Notice has been received from Nintendo and that the content will be removed. We cannot comment
on volume of content to be removed, this is done on an individual case by case basis.”
With Game Builder Garage, Nintendo has provided an officially sanctioned avenue for fan game
development. Players can make whatever they want – they just can’t publish them to a wider audience.
Nintendo as a developer wants to encourage creativity, but Nintendo as a company doesn’t
want this creativity to slip out of their control. That said, it’ll be fun to see how Game Builder
Garage users, both young and old, can embrace this new tool to learn a game development skill.
There are now more opportunities for game development than ever before. There’s never
been a better time to build indie games. As Game Builder Garage proves,
there’s room for creativity and fun both in playing, and in developing games. We’ll be
interested to see whether Nintendo leans into this concept more in the future.