I'll start by saying I know Nintendo is within their rights to perform cease and desists. A lot of fan made projects have been shut down by them and it only shows how out of touch they are with fans and the world outside of their home in Japan. This latest thing only keeps showing the worst of what they are. A project done by a group led to a port of Super Mario Bros. for the Commodore 64.
What is a Commodore 64? It's a computer from that said company from the early 80s and lasted a very long time. As with most older systems, homebrew has become commonplace for these relics. Unreleased games, original homebrew and a few other knick knacks are what you'll see. With Mario, it was a seven year project in the making. Until Commander Keen came out in 1990 for DOS, computers struggled a lot with scrolling screens. Looking at the title screen as well, it is very faithful considering the hardware is older than the Famicom by a year or two.
It does not surprise me Nintendo went after this. But that doesn't mean I can't express my view on it. And it is another really bad move by them and one that is very stupid. Is Super Mario Bros going to lose value just because it was ported to the C64? No. It is one of the most common games ever. For NES, the Game Boy Color and Advance. They hurt the retro community a lot more than they realize. Last year, it was the whole emulation site thing and to lose tons of PC, Sega, Sony, Atari and other companies systems and games on secure sites was a huge blow. Investing in Nintendo systems is very expensive.
Homebrew has been around for a very long time. Plenty of people have ported Doom to numerous machines and every day objects like ATMs. Sonic the Hedgehog has seen so many community made games over the last 20 years and fan Christian Whitehead was responsible for several approved ports and the excellent Sonic Mania. Patches are made for games that are Japan only to translate into English. One of the biggest communities is for the ill-fated Atari Jaguar, which has probably more homebrew games than the system had actual releases during its life. Most companies don't care. For Nintendo to keep doing this, it keeps showing the pig headed approach they have in understanding the Internet.
This thing would not hurt them because are Switch and 3DS owners going to care? Probably not. And it's not like Nintendo is doing anywhere good with distributing their classic games since the Wii U. This stuff is here to stay and they could embrace the support their fans have instead of shitting on them. More of the reason why to get into other consoles and PCs.
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