Enjoy This Fan Made Take On ‘Mario 64’ While You Can

This post will serve as the start of what will be a familiar cycle for fans of Nintendo. I'm going to show you something cool that Nintendo fans did, you're going to get moderately excited, and then you'll immediately become depressed when you realize that Nintendo will absolutely shut this cool project down in the name of copyright. This happens all the time, with Nintendo shutting down remakes of games that are decades old, a fan-made modded up version of Super Mario Bros. that allowed up to 75 players to play a level at the same time, and getting a video of a fan project for a first-person Pokemon game taken down. It's due to these actions and many, many more that I have taken to referring to Nintendo as the Disney of the video game industry.

And so here we are, where I'll show you a fan-made project, built from the ground up, to create a first-person horror game based on Mario 64.

A guy gets a mysterious letter from his girlfriend, arrives at a castle to find her missing, and loads of rooms full of monsters... It's the setup to 1996's classic Super Mario 64, sure, but it's also very much also a survival horror pitch, which is why this new fan-made project is such a perfect fit.

Via Nintendo Life, this is Another Princess Is In Our Castle, a Super Mario 64 inspired horror experience," where you decide to come back to Peach's castle a few years after the princess' death, but something isn't quite right..."

For those of us of a certain age that played the original Mario 64, this really does look cool. The castle has been recreated, as has a bunch of familiar characters. Except that the feel and ambiance is all wrong and there's a mystery afoot, featuring what appears to be a tiny ghost version of Princess Peach.

And here's where the cycle turns. If you're anything like me, roughly around the end of this short video you suddenly begin wondering exactly how long the video and demo will be available. After all, the countdown to Nintendo DMCAing everything to do with this project has absolutely begun.

And the question is why? The company could figure out a way to officially license these fan projects if it wanted to. Copyright isn't like trademark law, in that Nintendo could largely ignore this fan-made project without risking any of its own rights. After all, this project doesn't compete with Mario 64, a game released many years ago and now mostly only available as an emulated game on a Nintendo Switch.

Look, maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised and Nintendo won't Nintendo this time. But I could probably start drafting an update post to this one now and it's unlikely I'd be wasting my time.