Last month, Mark “Alvin Earthworm” Haynes rebooted his popular web series Super Mario Bros. Z, a fan-made sprite animation using actual game sprites from Mario and Sonic games. Haynes also launched a Patreon page for the new series, asking fans to donate to help the production of each episode. The Patreon page quickly reached over $5000 dollars per episode, which is a lot of money for a fan-made parody. Sure enough, Nintendo came in and shut down the Patreon page, leaving the future for this “non-profit fan crossover movie project” uncertain. Haynes took to twitter to share his displeasure with Nintendo’s actions.
Haynes has since made a new Patreon page that doesn’t specify if the money will be used for Super Mario Bros. Z. The page is for Haynes “Digital Art and Animation”and the donations are for each “episode.” If this money turns out to be for Super Mario Bros. Z, this same situation may happen again.
This is certainly an interesting dilema. I’m sure Super Mario Bros. Z takes a lot of time and Mark Haynes puts a lot of work into it, but it is a series that uses characters and sprites that are owned by Nintendo and Sega. Haynes had no problem with Nintendo when he was releasing the series on Newgrounds for free back in 2006, but now that he is asking for donations he is technically making a profit off another company’s intellectual property,which is pretty illegal.
Nintendo is kind of like Disney where they are really strict about fans using their IPs. There are no problems if a fan makes something for free, but once you bring crowdfunding into it things become more difficult. It’s fine to make a series like Super Mario Bros Z if you’re doing it for fun, but once you ask for profit Nintendo has every right to take it down. You can see some of Haynes tweets about the whole incident, one of which literally says “F*** Nintendo.”