For the past few months, Nintendo-related content has been disappearing from Garry’s Mod, the physics-based sandbox game and modding platform beloved by Steam players.
The source of the takedown requests presents a worst-case scenario for the community; rather than coming from copyright trolls, the takedowns are coming from Nintendo itself, according to creator Garry Newman of Facepunch Studios. “I have been assured that the takedowns have been verified by Nintendo as legit,” Newman wrote on X, adding that removals will continue as planned. “Sorry.”
Facepunch has its work cut out for it. “We have 20 years of uploads to go through,” the studio wrote on the game’s Steam page. “If you want to help us by deleting your Nintendo related uploads and never uploading them again, that would help us a lot.”
Neither Nintendo nor Newman responded to a request for comment.
Nintendo’s aggressive copyright protection is well documented and widely known. The company goes after emulator creators, homebrew tools, fanmade games, parodies, and more; even major mod platforms avoid hosting content they fear could attract a Nintendo copyright claim. Facepunch says the request to remove these items is “fair enough.”
“This is Nintendo’s content and what they allow and don’t allow is up to them,” the developer wrote in its announcement. “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.”
Within the Garry’s Mod community, some users are scrambling to archive whatever they can.
Since news that Nintendo is behind the takedowns broke, new add-ons have been appearing in the store: content like stickers reading “Fuck Nintendo,” or reskins for dumpsters branding them “Nintendo Office.” It is unclear whether these new additions will also be removed.