Nintendo has taken down the fan-made native PC HD port of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening DX, claiming that it was copyrighted material. The files have been removed and in their place, a link to the takedown notice from Nintendo has been shared.
It looks like the title’s remaster, made available on PC just a couple of days ago, has been removed by Nintendo since the game had copyrighted material integrated into it. The title made by an unknown modder didn’t need the original ROM file, which is why it had been flagged as copyrighted content and probably why Nintendo decided to take it down. This might have been avoided if the developer had utilized the original ROM file, but unfortunately, that wasn’t the case here.
The Nintendo Switch remake first appeared on the Nintendo Switch in 2019 with enhanced visuals and audio that made Link’s classic adventure more epic than it ever was. The PC port is based on the original The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening DX game, so the visuals aren’t comparable, but it did introduce widescreen support, high resolution, and high frame rate options so that gamers could utilize the hardware capabilities of their modern platform.
Nintendo has a long history of actually striking down projects from third-party sources. One example is when the company initiated takedowns for Lockpick, the homebrew project that allowed users to ‘dump’ their own digital keys from their Switch consoles and load them on emulators like Ryujinx and Yuzu for PC. On another occasion, Nintendo took down a multiplayer version of Zelda Breath of the Wild and put copyright strikes on the content creator PointCrow, who was responsible for the mod project.
Nintendo has the “knack” for suppressing creativity in the modding community. However, that hasn’t stopped modders who keep working on astonishing projects based on Nintendo franchises, such as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Unreal Engine 5 remake, which recently got NVIDIA DLSS 3 (Frame Generation) support.
