Nintendo Forces Takedown of Super Mario 64 HD Browser Project

The recent Super Mario 64 fan project that made the game playable in your browser has, unsurprisingly, been shut down by Nintendo.

When visiting the page where it had been located, you're now greeted by a DMCA copyright infringement complaint that Nintendo sent to the file's host, CloudFlare. As a result, the web player and downloadable version of Super Mario 64 HD are no longer available.

However--as with everything on the Internet--if you already downloaded the game (or know someone who did), there's nothing to stop you from continuing to play it.

Despite the somewhat ambitious-sounding name, Super Mario 64 HD was simply a remake of the N64 game's first level, Bob-omb Battlefield. It was built using the Unity engine and was intended as nothing more than a tech demo. Its creator, former Microsoft Games Studios engineer Erik Ross, noted at the time of its release that he had no intention to monetize the project, though that obviously wasn't enough to satisfy Nintendo's lawyers.

"All the art and animations were done by myself, with the exception of the Mario, Goomba and Power Star meshes, which are ripped (without animations) from Super Mario Galaxy," Ross wrote on his blog earlier this month. "A large portion of the sounds are from existing Mario games, while the ones I found and edited myself are from freesound.org."

Game companies don't often take kindly to their intellectual property being used without their permission, as evidenced by things like fan-made Minecraft movies and Final Fantasy VII web series being shut down.