Nintendo gets cross with US pirates

By Tom Bramwell Published 2 November, 2004

Sits on a couple of American cowboys.

Nintendo, following a legal spat with porn site SuicideGirls over use of a trademark, has obtained restraining orders against two American firms to stop them importing and selling counterfeit Nintendo products.

The products in question are sold in malls in the US - and openly in the UK to no reaction from Nintendo of Europe - and come in the form of what looks like an N64 controller, preloaded with NES games such as Super Mario Bros and Donkey Kong.

"This action is one of many steps Nintendo is taking to protect its creative rights and to combat the growing international problem of product piracy," says Nintendo's antipiracy director Jodi Daugherty. "We're confident that mall management companies around the nation will provide their complete cooperation upon being informed of the court's decision."

NOE has made no comment on whether or not it intends to follow suit in Europe.

Nintendo has been highly litigious in recent years, only last week threatening SuicideGirls.com simply because one of the featured models listed Metroid as an interest in her biog. In addition, and on a far more serious note, NOE famously stopped high street retailer CEX importing and selling legitimate Nintendo merchandise from abroad in 2002. Ironically, Nintendo itself received a record fine from the EU in 2002 for price fixing in Europe, to the tune of GBP 94 million.

Picture of Tom.

About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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Comments (15) Latest comment 7 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Tiger_Walts #1 7 years ago

    There's a stand in the St George's shopping centre in Preston selling these.

    What do I get for grassing them up?

    Oh some stars. :/

  • Takashi #2 7 years ago

    Amusingly enough, the SuicideGirls.com thing ended up with a letter from Nintendo apologising the (openly overblown) legal action, and both people targeted were offered a free Nintendo console and game at choice.

    As for Pirate NES games, they're a bit late, no? Those chinese clones are being sold in europe for years now. Tracking down everybody who imports them will prove amusing.

  • Blerk #3 7 years ago

    I was playing with one of these in a local market the other day! The NES version of Paperboy... :-)

    £20, though. Didn't buy one.

  • Sko #4 7 years ago

    It's one thing to have for a bloke down the car boot selling CDs with laser-copied labels but to manufacture a unit specifically and hoping they wouldn't notice? Kinda taking the piss...

  • Blerk #5 7 years ago

    They didn't do anything up until now. I imagine they've already made a fat bundle of cash out of it - the cease and desist order will just make them look elsewhere for something else to make cash out of.

  • linkster #6 7 years ago

    There's one in Banbury shopping center too. They look much better conversions than the shit I saw on a presumably official £2k arcade cabinet in Selfridges a while back.

  • Plob #7 7 years ago

    I saw one of those in bluewater and wondered how the hell they'd licensed all those games off Nintendo. Answer: they hadn't!

  • gizmo #8 7 years ago

    Methinks Nintendo have got more lawyers than game programmers!

  • Feanor #9 7 years ago

    LOL. A few months ago my wife and I made the mistake of looking at a display of those counterfeit Nintendo things in the local mall. The guy selling them wouldn't let us leave and kept pressuring us to buy one. When we finally got away he was all pissed off, but we were just looking and had no intention of getting one. The system had thousands of games on it and only cost about US $60 so I knew it must have been illegal, and I wondered if Nintendo knew about it.

  • Pirotic #10 7 years ago

    In otherwords, Nintendo now expect you to buy the £15 GBA ports instead.

  • Nikanoru #11 7 years ago

    Haha. I've seen the TV commercials for this. It was funny how they entirely avoided naming the Nintendo name, even though it was so obvious what it was stealing from.

    There was even some Mario game they were playing, and one of the salesmen said "this reminds me of that one game....you know, with the two brothers!" Fuck. I hate overzealous copyright protection, don't get me wrong, but I'm glad they took this down.

  • Nillsens #12 7 years ago

    I don't understand what they were thinking when they re-released Metroid for GBA.
    I have the game twice already, on TV and GBA...

  • firefly #13 7 years ago

    Yeah funnily enough I had to force myself to not pick up a 2nd hand NES and a copy of Metroid at my local Gamestation last week arguing that I already had Metroid on both Metroid Prime and Metroid: Zero Mission, that I had all the NES games I care about on other formats and that I was hardly in the financial position for random impulse buys. Still sad to turn down the opportunity to finally own a NES after all those Christmases when my parents were convinced I could get all the same games on the PC!

  • code:ninja #14 7 years ago

    Over in Asia, they are NEVER gonna pay what we have to for hardware and software.
    I just got back from malaysia, and they have brands like Panesonic, Hitachy etc. - its all carbon copies of the proper stuff. (no ps2s tho).

    FFS nearly everything we use computer wise is manufactured there. All this security protection is practically common knowledge there since piracy is big money.

    As for games - practically every software store sells "legitimate" titles for next to nothing, and often in much better deals than we get here.
    For example the entire adobe software suite for £1. beat that.

    Sorry, but It wont make shit difference what Sony, Ms or Nintendo do.

    If you pay people nutz to manufacture chips and technologies which are then sold on to make millions - why shouldn't they put their knowledge to better use.

    Piracy is part of the IT infrastructure, and I can't believe these companies are chasing the dream of trying to wipe it out. Thats a bigger waste of money than they will ever loose in software sales.

    Its dumb and greedy.


  • gonrico #15 7 years ago

    I see those things all the time. I find it quite funny.