The great game developer Nintendo has made headlines in recent years with video takedowns due to copyright issues. In December 2022, they struck again, blocking a video about a previously unknown Zelda game. However, the video is back on YouTube.
In October 2022, the YouTube channel “DidYouKnowGaming?” released a documentary about an old Nintendo game that never made it beyond the creative phase.
According to this, the developer studio “Retro Studios”, a subsidiary of Nintendo, pitched the game in 2004. At that time, they were just finishing up Metroid Prime 2. The game was discarded fairly quickly – however, the initial ideas were conceived within the universe of “The Legend of Zelda”.
Together with the then-developer Paul Tozour, DidYouKnowGaming? created a documentary on the subject. The title: “LOST Zelda Game for Nintendo DS: Heroes of Hyrule”.
But a few months later, around the Christmas season of 2022, Nintendo discovered the video and reported a copyright infringement to YouTube. The video went offline.
The reason for the takedown was said to be that “unauthorized material” was used. However, Shane Gill, the head behind the DidYouKnowGaming? channel, did not give up. He challenged the takedown, and now the video is accessible again on YouTube.
Why is the video back online? Shane Gill explains that one can contest a copyright infringement on YouTube. He did this in the case of the Zelda video.
YouTube then gives the complaining company, in this case Nintendo, 10 business days to prove that they want to legally pursue the copyright infringement.
However, no lawsuit came. Shane Gill wrote on Twitter that he spent the last 2 weeks checking his emails and waiting for letters from Nintendo.
Gill thinks: “Their intention was to delete this piece of journalism from the internet because they didn’t like what it revealed” (via twitter.com).
The video about the secret Zelda game can be found here:
What kind of game was it actually? The first concepts sketch out a game that could roughly be described as an XCOM in the Zelda universe. Final Fantasy developers Square already released a game in 1997 with “Final Fantasy Tactics” that would have likely been similar to “Heroes of Hyrule”.
Fights in such turn-based tactical RPGs take place on a game board that is divided into fields, and game characters possess movement and action points.
However, it is unclear how far the Zelda idea was spun out. Developer Tozour said: “At no point was it anything like Zelda. It was a failed experiment that happened to take place in the Zelda universe”.
Nintendo has previously had videos taken down on YouTube: Nintendo blocks 1,300 videos from important channel in one day – “We have no alternative”
