In recent years, the large games manufacturer Nintendo has repeatedly made a name for itself with video blocking due to copyright. Also in December 2022, a video about a previously unknown Zelda game was blocked. But the video is back on YouTube.
In October 2022, the DidYouKnowGaming? YouTube channel released a documentary about an old Nintendo game that never made it past the creative stage.
Accordingly, the developer studio “Retro Studios”, a subsidiary of Nintendo, pitched the game in 2004. Back then, they were finishing Metroid Prime 2. The game was scrapped fairly quickly – however, the first ideas were conceived in the universe of The Legend of Zelda.
Together with then developer Paul Tozour, DidYouKnowGaming? a documentary on the subject. The title: “LOST Zelda Game for Nintendo DS: Heroes of Hyrule”.
However, a few months later, around the 2022 holiday season, Nintendo spotted the video and reported copyright infringement to YouTube. The video went offline.
The reason for the blocking was that “unauthorized material” was used. However, Shane Gill, the brains behind the DidYouKnowGaming? channel, didn’t let up. He took action against the blocking and the video is now available again on YouTube.
Why is the video online again? Shane Gill explains that you can challenge copyright infringement on YouTube. He did that in the case of the Zelda video.
YouTube then gives the suing company, in this case Nintendo, 10 business days to prove that they intend to take legal action against the copyright infringement.
However, there was no lawsuit. Shane Gill wrote on Twitter that he had spent the last 2 weeks checking his email and waiting for letters from Nintendo.
Gill thinks, “Their intention was to remove this piece of journalistic work from the internet because they didn’t like what it revealed” (via twitter.com).
You can find the video for the secret Zelda game here:
What was that game anyway? The first concepts outlined a game that could be roughly described as an XCOM set in the Zelda universe. Final Fantasy later came up with Final Fantasy Tactics, a game that would have been similar to Heroes of Hyrule.
However, it is unclear how far the Zelda idea was spun. Developer Tozour said: “At no point was it anything like Zelda. It was an experiment gone wrong and happened to be set in the Zelda universe.”
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