Garry’s Mod, a popular 2006 sandbox game that emerged from the modding scene around Valve’s Source software, has recently been issued takedown notices by Nintendo. As a result, Facepunch Studios, the developers of Garry’s Mod, are in the process of removing about 20 years’ worth of Nintendo-related content from the game.
In an update to Garry’s Mod’s Steam page, the developers stated, “Some of you may have noticed that certain Nintendo related workshop items have recently been taken down. This is not a mistake, the takedowns came from Nintendo.”
The update continues, “Honestly, this is fair enough. This is Nintendo’s content and what they allow and don’t allow is up to them. They don’t want you playing with that stuff in Garry’s Mod – that’s their decision, we have to respect that and take down as much as we can.”
Despite Nintendo’s litigious nature, not to mention its fierce protectiveness over its brand image and that of its mascots, the notice from Nintendo comes as a bit of a shock. As the update goes on to note, Nintendo content has been hosted on Garry’s Mod for close to 20 years. Models of countless Nintendo mascots like Mario have been ported over to the Source engine for the enjoyment of anyone playing Garry’s Mod since the very beginning. It’s strange for Nintendo to suddenly come out of the blue and enforce a takedown of this much content, especially since the flexibility of the Source engine in Garry’s Mod was a large part of the appeal behind the game, which was popularized in the early 2010s by a slew of gaming Youtube personalities playing multiplayer social-deduction games in Garry’s Mod such as Prop Hunt and Trouble In Terrorist Town. Of course, you could also argue that Facepunch was, at times, a little too lenient about what they allowed on Garry’s Mod, making sense of Nintendo’s decision to take action after all this time.
Nintendo-themed add-ons seem to have begun getting taken down a few months ago, though Facepunch didn’t publicly divulge that the company had issued the takedowns until earlier today. The process has been “ongoing” since then, and the developers are still working to remove all of it, which is an understandably Herculean task.
It’s so much, in fact, that at the very end of the update, Facepunch jokes that, “If you want to help us by deleting your Nintendo related uploads and never uploading them again, that would help us a lot.”