by Doc – Owner, Founder, Remembers Reading the News Back When It Happened
Project M, for the unwashed uneducated gamer masses, was a mod of Super Smash Bros Brawl that implemented Melee mechanics, and turned the game into an extremely fleshed out, high quality fighting game the likes of which have rarely been seen by studios and fangames before or since. Project M was, dare I say, the single greatest Super Smash Bros game ever made, as it combined excellent “fan understanding” of the series the characters were based on with innovation of the mechanics that Smash is built on. It was just really freaking great.
Then on December 1, 2015, its development shut down without warning. The team’s attorney said it wasn’t because of Nintendo, though speaking as an attorney myself (who does not have information on this case nor is providing any kind of legal opinion) I don’t know that I believe that. Nintendo is famous for suing its fans and shutting down fan projects. Given that Smash 4 was fresh off the presses and Ultimate was in development… it’s not hard to imagine that a cease and desist was in order. Typically in IP law the holder of an intellectual property wants their name out there as someone who will vigorously defend their intellectual property, so if it were Nintendo you’d expect that information would have come out. But Nintendo is in a unique spot, as they sue their fans often enough that, and this is just a hunch, I think it’s burned a lot of the gaming consumer base on the thought of ever buying Nintendo. So it benefits them to keep mum.
Either way, exactly ten years to the date of that shutdown a new update to Pokemon Legends: Z-A was released… and the update is called “Project M”. Project M features the addition of Mewtwo, the unofficial mascot of the Project M mod, to Z-A.
So I have to ask… is this an homage, a coincidence or Game Freak (subsidiary of the Pokémon Company, owned in part by and deeply interwoven with Nintendo) saying “remember what we did to your little game?”
I’m not sure.
Amiibo Doctor 