This month marks the 35th anniversary of Nintendo's iconic Super Mario Bros. getting released on the NES and, apparently, in celebration, the video game giant decided to go after a lewd, freeware Princess Peach hentai game that's lurked online for over eight years. But the decision to remove Peach's Untold Tale also raises some serious questions regarding fair use and parody laws.
Eight years of Untold Tale was long enough —
Created by a South American-located developer named Ivan Aedler back in 2012, Peach's Untold Tale, first debuted on the Legend of Krystal forums, and developed a bit of cult following (a single gameplay walkthrough video on the porn site, Xvideos, currently has over 2 million views) for its long-running updates and gameplay featuring — you guessed it — Princess Peach doing things that are best left "untold" to avoid entering any NSFW territory. Despite either being largely ignored or flying under the radar for close to a decade, Nintendo last week finally decided to clamp down on Aedler, filing a DMCA complaint with Github, which hosted the game for download.
Parody, or copyright infringement—
All (blue) jokes aside, Nintendo's decision to go after PUT does appear a little legally murky at first glance. After all, porn parodies of popular IPs are nothing new to the industry, but as Nintendo notes in its Github complaint, after extensive review the company "does not believe [PUT] qualifies as a fair use of Nintendo’s copyright-protected work.”
While TorrentFreak notes many of these copyright infringement claims are examined on a case-by-case basis, the real truth of the matter here is that those legal ordeals are often exorbitantly expensive to maintain, meaning it's probably unlikely someone like Aedler will mount any kind of official court challenge to Nintendo's cease and desist. While Aedler mentioned on his Patreon that he'd "prefer to be dead" than give up on his beloved PUT, he is currently only raking in around $175 per month on the site.
While the PUT drama plays out, let's take a moment to remind ourselves that if there's any Super Mario video game not getting its due these days, it's Super Mario Sunshine. Likewise, you can actually play far more family-friendly Mario titles on a new Nintendo handheld, and these Super Mario-themed Puma sneakers are dope as hell, too.
