Pokémon Uranium

» see pokemonuranium.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Pokémon Uranium went up as a free Windows download on 6 August 2016. It was a whole Pokémon game that Nintendo had nothing to do with: its own region and 150 invented species, plus an extra elemental type called Nuclear that turned existing creatures into irradiated versions of themselves. It looked like a Game Boy Advance title and ran on a PC.

Two people built most of it, working under the handles ~JV~ and Involuntary Twitch. The tools were RPG Maker XP and Pokémon Essentials, a fan-made kit that has been handed around the hobby for two decades and does the tedious half of the work, the battle math and the party menus, so that a small team only has to draw and write. Development started in 2007 and ran for nine years.

Then the download counter did something nobody on the project had planned for. The game went out to 1.5 million people inside its first week, which is a number that stops being a hobby and starts being a distribution channel. Press picked it up. The Game Awards put it on the 2016 ballot for Best Fan Creation.

On 13 August, one week after release, lawyers acting for Nintendo of America began contacting the sites hosting the file. The developers were never contacted directly. They took the links down off their own site anyway and posted a short note about it: "While we have not personally been contacted, it's clear what their wishes are, and we respect those wishes deeply."

I was 32 that year and writing other people's software for a living, so the figure that sticks here is not the download count. It is the nine years. Two people kept a side project running across most of a decade, shipped it finished, and watched it get pulled inside seven days. Nintendo's position on fan games has never been a secret and was not a secret in 2007 either. Building it for nine years anyway, knowing that, is the whole character of the thing.

~ the dossier ~

~ the seven days ~

The week Pokémon Uranium was legally downloadable is the only week it ever had. Coverage ran on the strength of two facts: it was finished, and it was free. Fan projects in this series usually die as forum threads with a demo attached, and the small number that reach a full release do it quietly. This one landed with a complete Pokédex and a postgame attached.

The Game Awards nomination is the odd detail. An industry award show put a piece of unlicensed Nintendo-derived software on a public ballot, and then withdrew it after the takedown, which is roughly the shortest possible arc for an award nomination.

~ how the takedown worked ~

No lawsuit was filed and no cease-and-desist reached the developers. Nintendo went to the hosts instead, which is faster and does not require anyone to argue about fair use in front of a judge. The file came off the mirrors, the official site removed its own links, and the project was effectively over in a day.

Development kept limping along in private for a few weeks. By September 2016 it had stopped for good, with the team citing a lack of time and resources. They also made a point of saying they could not vouch for any reupload, because by then the reuploads were everywhere.

~ what the takedown did not reach ~

The file is still out there. A million and a half copies had already landed on a million and a half hard drives before the first host was contacted, and you cannot DMCA a hard drive. Fans kept patching it for years afterward, adding content to a codebase whose original authors had walked away from it.

~JV~ and Involuntary Twitch went on to a new project called Pokémon Flux. The Nuclear type stayed in the fan vocabulary, which is more than most nine-year projects leave behind.

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