If there’s one thing that Nintendo has gained a reputation for in recent years, it’s their relentless copyright strikes. Whether it's fan-made game projects or music, the company really don’t take kindly to any breaches, and are often very quick to act in taking stuff down.
Well, in the last couple of days, they struck again, literally. Popular gaming music channel, GilvaSunner, got hit with a colossal amount of blocks on Saturday, and has seen over 1300 songs removed. The takedown includes the soundtracks for a load of Mario and Zelda games, like Super Mario Galaxy, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and Skyward Sword.
Before we go on, be sure to check out our top five moments in Zelda games below.
This isn’t the first time that GilvaSunner has been hit with such a huge onslaught of strikes: “Let me clarify again that I do not monetise videos and do not profit from them. I do realise that doesn’t justify uploading the content,” they tweeted in December 2020. “I’m also not angry or surprised that Nintendo is doing this, but I do think it’s a bit disappointing there is hardly an alternative. If Nintendo thinks this is what needs to be done (to set an example), I will let them take down the channel. It is their content after all.”
Of course, Nintendo is definitely well within their rights to stop channels from posting their official game music, but as GilvaSunner and a number of Nintendo fans have pointed out, there’s not really many great alternatives for fans to listen to their music. There are no official Spotify uploads, and very few soundtracks have been individually sold (a number of Pokémon ones are available on Apple Music). So it would seem that they want everyone to listen to everything via Smash Bros. Ultimate’s music list.
Just recently, Nintendo also removed a fan game from the internet in which players could go around shooting Pokémon with guns, which I suppose really isn’t all that surprising given that they were using assets from the actual games, as well as blasting poor Pikachu into oblivion. Either way, they’re really not letting anything slip through the cracks lately. At this time, GilvaSunner hasn’t said whether or not they’ll be re-uploading the soundtracks, but this is no doubt bad news for anyone who had YouTube playlists full of their uploads - good luck sorting that out.
