Garry's Mod is removing 20 years' worth of Nintendo-related items from its Steam Workshop following takedown request: 'It's Nintendo. Need more be said?'

Following a takedown request issued by Nintendo, the famed physics sandbox Garry's Mod is removing «all Nintendo related stuff» from its Steam Workshop.

«Some of you may have noticed that certain Nintendo related workshop items have recently been taken down,» Facepunch Studios said in a Steam update. «This is not a mistake, the takedowns came from Nintendo.

»Honestly, this is fair enough. This is Nintendo's content and what they allow and don't allow is up to them. They don't want you playing with that stuff in Garry's Mod—that's their decision, we have to respect that and take down as much as we can."

The «not a mistake» line may have been prompted in part by earlier DMCA claims against Nintendo-related mods that some Garry's Mod players claimed were fraudulent. It's not clear whether that was actually the case, but it seems to definitely not be the case now.

Nintendo is notoriously protective of its property, and it's not shy about getting heavy with people it thinks are getting out of line. Earlier this year, for instance, it sued the makers of the Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu, forcing a near-immediate halt to its development (and sticking the developers with a $2.4 million bill); more famously, it saddled programmer and hacker Gary Bowser with a $14.5 million financial albatross he'll be paying off for the rest of his life, on top of more than a year spent in a US federal prison, for the crime of making and selling «circumvention devices» for the Switch.

It's the sort of brutal behavior that has a deep, chilling impact, sometimes beyond the obvious targets. In January, for instance, Valve ordered a halt to Portal 64, a popular Portal demake for the Nintendo 64. Portal 64 maker James Labert said he was asked by Valve to take the project down because it «depends on Nintendo's proprietary libraries.»

«I think Valve didn't want to be tied up in a project involving Nintendo IP,» Lambert told PC Gamer at the time. «I don't blame them.»

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