Over the last decade, mods, hacks and other fan games have only grown in popularity. Whether it’s crazy Mario 64 hacks from folks like Kaze Emanuar, Super Mario World Kaizo hacks like Invictus or overhaul projects for classic games like Super Mario Sunshine and Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, the number and quality of these games has gotten better all around, with many of the best projects being on par with official releases in all sorts of ways.
Yet despite this popularity, there’s still a lot of confusion around these games. Whether it’s assuming companies like Nintendo shut down every project in site to thinking they’re marketing tools for aspiring indie devs, sites like Reddit and Twitter are full of crazy misconceptions that need clearing up.
So today, we’re gonna do just that. We’re gonna look at all the most common misconceptions about fan games and explain why they’re all completely wrong.
Starting, with the comment every fan game developer receives 50 times a day…
1. Most Fan Games & Mods Get Shut Down by the IP Owner
Especially when it comes to Nintendo ones. The comments about Nintendo ‘ninjas’ are omnipresent online, and pop up every time a fan game or mod gets popular on sites like Twitter or Reddit.
But this fear is extremely overblown. In fact, based on our research in the past, the number of projects shut down by companies is on the low side overall.
What’s more, those that do get shut down tend to fall into legally murky territory to begin with. Or at least, legally murkier territory.
Like say, all the remakes, direct Super Mario Maker competitors, fan films being funded on Kickstarter, etc. Hence you can probably remove half the list if you ignore projects that tried to charge people money, or which remade a game Nintendo was selling at that moment in time.
Out of the ones remaining, at least one got in trouble for a domain name (Super Mario Bros X), and a few others ended up going back up pretty quickly without any further issues. In fact, most of these projects are still available online in some form anyway, just with a new team and website hosting them.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands or even millions of other projects are going just fine without a care in the world. Some got covered in the mainstream media, some have wiki articles or entire wikis devoted to them, some have been in development for decades…
And entire communities have been online since the late 90s without any legal issues at all. Heck, some people even built their entire YouTube careers off these things, with some popular creators having millions of subscribers and views.
Oh, and that’s Nintendo we’re talking about, aka the most fan unfriendly gaming company around. For pretty much every other major publisher out there, their attitude towards fan projects has been either entirely neutral or mostly positive, like with Sega, Capcom, Bethesda, etc.
So yeah, the chances of a fan project getting shut down are very slim to say the least.
2. Fan Game Devs Should Make Spiritual Successors
We also see a lot of comments about how fan games and mods should just be their own games instead, and that their developers should stick to spiritual successors like Pizza Tower or Bug Fables.
But again, this misses a key point about why people make these games. Put simply, they don’t just enjoy the original franchise for its mechanics.
No, they enjoy it for the characters and worldbuilding in general. For many Mario fan game devs, the Mario series itself is what inspires them to work on their games, not the moment-to-moment mechanics found in the series. The only reason they got into game development at all was because they wanted to design their own Mario levels, or create interactive fan fiction featuring their favourite characters.
Same goes for every franchise out there. Zelda modders like the Legend of Zelda series, Pokémon devs like the Pokémon world and species, Sonic fans like Sonic and his supporting cast, etc.
At the end of the day, only fan games and mods appeal to them because the original universe is why they got into the hobby at all. They’re just making games about their favourite characters rather than drawing fan art of them or writing up a story on AO3.
3. Fan Games/Mods Are Distinct From Other Fan Works
There’s also a weird attitude towards these projects that seems to differentiate them from other fan works. Like say, fan fiction, fan art, cosplay, YouTube theory videos, etc.
But is there really a difference there?
No, not really. Yes, they share the same format as the original work does, in that they’re video games rather than art or literature.
Yet so do other works based on those mediums. There’s no technical distinction between Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings and fan fic based on them. There’s no technical distinction between a fan made Doctor Who or Lord of the Rings film/series or a Star Wars fan film and the original series.
And there’s no legal distinction here either. Legally speaking, fan games and mods are no more or less ‘infringing’ than fan fic, fan art, fan films or other fan creations.
So why do people seem less bothered and more resigned to companies like Nintendo taking down some works, but not others? There’d be a mass outcry if say, JK Rowling or Stephen King went on the warpath against AO3, or Disney started mass striking pictures of Mickey Mouse on Twitter. Or if say, some cosplayer was hauled into court for selling pictures of themselves in a costume online.
But there’s no legal distinction there. Why are fan games and mods seen as somehow ‘lesser’ in terms of legality here?
4. Fan Games Are Just Marketing Materials for Original Works
Back to the spiritual successor point, we also see a related claim spread online too. That being, that most fan game projects are merely a way for the developer to market their skills in advance of an original project. That in some cases, they didn’t even intend to finish the game at all, and instead wanted to use the publicity to start their own studio.
This is complete bullshit.
In fact, in the 20 years we’ve spent in various modding and game development communities, we’ve never seen a fan project that was started as a way to get publicity or pivot into indie game development. Every single one of them was intended to be a finished project in its original form.
But there are devs who pivot to indie games instead of fan projects. And there are a few obvious reasons for that:
- Indie game development pays money and fan game development does not. If you’ve spent years working on a game for free, it’s rather tempting to retool it as an original project so you can get something of a return on your investment.
- If you actually do get shut down by the IP owner, it’s a lot easier to retool your cancelled project into its own thing rather than start from scratch.
- And if you finish a fan game or project, you’ve usually built the skills needed to make original games too. May as well keep the team together and try something new!
So, it can definitely appear as if the fan project was a publicity stunt, especially if that version got shut down or ran into development hell. But trust us, the original intention was to finish the fan game or mod as is, not use it as a way to springboard an unrelated indie game.
5. Fan Games Are Incredibly Difficult
On a different note, there’s also the idea that fan projects tend to be very difficult to complete as a normal player. That the majority of fan games and mods are extremely challenging compared to the series they’re based on.
But the true story is a bit more complex than that.
You see, on the one hand, there is generally a bit of a harsher difficulty curve in your typical fan game compared to your typical ‘official’ release. Your average Mario hack will usually have difficulty on par with the lategame and postgame in an official Nintendo title, and your average Mario Kart custom track will often be a bit more complex than anything in 8 Deluxe or World.
And there are some reasons for this discrepancy. The average fan game or mod developer is far better at the original series than most players are, and it’s harder to design an easy level that remains fun than a hard one.
However, it’s also a bit of an exaggeration too. One that’s mostly down to the popularity of Kaizo hacks online.
Since well, influencers and creators love playing incredibly difficult mods and fan games. Most Super Mario World streamers and let’s players focus on them, most Zelda mod videos are about things like randomisers and Relics of the Past, and many Pokémon ones are about games designed for pros where every opponent has a VGC/Smogon worthy team and advanced strats for how to use them.
But that doesn’t cover every fan project under the sun.
No, there are also thousands with difficulty on par with your average Nintendo game. Like say, Super Mario World and New Super Mario Bros Wii mods that feel just like a sequel to the original game.
Just filter a site like SMW Central by ‘casual’ or ‘standard difficulty’, and you’ll find plenty of examples.
So yeah, fan games aren’t all that difficult. It’s just the most popular and well-known ones tend to be the kind played by popular YouTubers and Twitch streamers.
6. It’s not worth working on fan games and mods
Finally, there’s the attitude that these sorts of projects aren’t worth working on. That all the effort spent on these games is being wasted, and the folks involved would be better off doing something else.
However, we disagree wholeheartedly there. In fact, we’d see fan game and mod development is a fantastic way to get into game design and development in general.
Since well, the barrier to entry can be pretty low compared to everything else. With existing characters and a wealth of resources, you don’t need to design your entire cast list, world, items, etc from the ground up. You can just put your game design skills to the test with what’s already there.
That’s a valuable learning experience in of itself.
And it’s especially valuable given that the communities for these projects tend to be a lot… stricter on what they like and accept than Steam or Itch.io are.
Seriously, the people here can be brutal about badly designed games, and your work will quickly get torn to shreds if you left a single stone unturned.
In fact, even submitting your game to some of these sites is a challenge. Instead of it going through a quick “check it doesn’t crash on startup” level review like the eShop or App Store gives out, the staff will actually play the whole thing from start to finish to make sure it functions as expected, has somewhat competent level design and doesn’t steal from everyone in sight.
So, the experience of getting the game accepted will often teach you how to improve your level design. You’ll actually get feedback on what you’ve done well or poorly.
Plus, if you actually get into the weeds and make technical changes, working on a mod teaches you a very important software engineering skill you’ll need for a possible career.
Namely, 90% of your time working on games or apps is spent trying to figure out how an existing codebase works and how to make changes in someone else’s code.
And given that most of the code you work with has barely been tested, has next to zero documentation and has written in the most awkward, poorly thought out, most cumbersome way possible…
Yeah, you can tell why we consider ROM hacking an amazing learning tool. That spent looking for memory addresses and figuring out which lines of code correspond to which in-game function is going to become incredibly useful when wading through 300,000 lines of code in an enterprise app vibe coded by a moron.
Oh god AI’s gonna make this even more painful, isn’t it?
Regardless, it’s a great learning experience for any would be game developer, and one which a lot of success stories have emerged from over time. For example, everyone knows that Toby Fox worked on Earthbound ROM hacks before Undertale, or that the team behind Sonic Mania got their start with Sonic fan games…
But did you know that Minecraft’s Notch and Terraria’s Redigit also got their start with fan projects? Yeah, the former worked on a Mario fan game with an open world design, and the latter created Super Mario Bros X, a sort of game development tool which you probably know about from projects like Mario & the Rainbow Stars.
Same goes with the team behind A Hat in Time (who’s lead was an active Mario Fan Games Galaxy contributor back in the day), and Psycutlery, an excellent game which was basically a spiritual successor to the classic fan game Psycho Waluigi.
There’s a whole laundry list of great games made by fan game and mod developers, and numerous creatives in the industry who got their start in those scenes too.
Fan game and mod development are amazing learning environments for game designers and developers, and communities that should be given way more respect from both the industry and gamers as a whole.
Regardless, those are some misconceptions about fan games and mods. Hopefully that shuts down some of the misinformation going around on sites like Reddit and Twitter, and gets you to appreciate the folks working on these projects more than you would have otherwise.
Either way, what did you think? Do you have any more fan game misconceptions you wish to highlight?
If so, leave your thoughts in the comments below, on social media, or on our Discord server today!