A Super Mario Bros. Commodore 64 port has (somewhat unsurprisingly) been hit with DMCA notices and taken down following its release after seven years of work. A programmer going by the name of Zeropaige has painstakingly ported one of the most iconic Nintendo games to a rival system since 2012 and finally released it to the world less than a week ago. Unfortunately, it seems that Zeropaige’s efforts were quickly overshadowed by a slew of DMCAs, ostensibly from Nintendo themselves.
As shown in the original forum post, the Super Mario Bros. Commodore 64 port contains both the U.S./Japanese version and the European version of the game along with several different options including turbo support. The port is programmed to attempt to run the game at the correct framerate and with the proper pitch for the game’s sound regardless of what sort of Commodore 64 you’re running it on.
However, TorrentFreak reports that the game’s files have been hit with DMCA notices across several download sites. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act is a U.S. law that allows copyright owners to send notices forcing content hosts to remove something that is believed in good faith to be breaking copyright law. It’s very unlikely that the Super Mario Bros. Commodore 64 port was licensed by Nintendo, so the Japanese-based gaming software and hardware company were entirely within their rights.
The creation of this port was nonetheless an impressive technical feat. While Nintendo has let the DMCA notices fly, it was out there on the Internet for a good few hours before they were able to get it taken down. That’s an eternity when it comes to distributing files online and the odds are good that there are still copies floating around out there on the Internet.
You can watch some Super Mario Bros. Commodore 64 gameplay in the video below.
