Legal & Compliance

Nintendo Hates Its Fans

Elious spent three years animating Pokémon by hand. Frame by frame, he built a YouTube channel called PokéNational Geographic:

By Conor Healy

May 15, 2026

Elious spent three years animating Pokémon by hand. Frame by frame, he built a YouTube channel called PokéNational Geographic: nature documentaries about Pokémon, narrated in the style of David Attenborough, rendered in original 3D animation. The channel had 100,000 subscribers. IGN covered it. Polygon covered it. Kotaku called it a love letter to the franchise.

Is fan art legal? Elious thought so. He wasn’t selling anything. He wasn’t copying game assets. The only material he used from Nintendo was audio clips of Pokémon cries, each under three seconds. Everything else was his own work.

Nintendo of America struck 20 videos in 12 hours. The channel is gone.

“I can’t fight this,” Elious said in a final video posted to a backup channel. “One guy. This is Nintendo of America.”

The Legal Answer

Is fan art legal? Technically, no. Fan art uses copyrighted characters without permission. The copyright holder can issue a takedown at any time, for any reason, regardless of whether money changed hands. Fair use exists as a defence, but fair use is determined by courts, and courts cost money. Nintendo has lawyers. Elious does not.

But that’s not the real answer. Fan art is legal until the copyright holder decides it isn’t. Most companies tolerate fan work because it builds community, generates free marketing, and costs nothing to ignore. Sega hires fan developers. Capcom looks the other way. Valve turned Counter-Strike modders into employees.

Nintendo destroys fan work. Consistently, relentlessly, uniquely.

The Crusade

I’ve covered Nintendo’s copyright enforcement before. ROM sites sued for millions. Over 500 fan games taken down in a single sweep. AM2R, a Metroid II remake built over years of volunteer labour, killed the week it launched. Pokémon Uranium, nine years of development and a nomination for The Game Awards, erased overnight. Metroid Prime 2D, fifteen years in development, destroyed four months after releasing a demo. Relic Castle, a Pokémon fan forum, taken offline even though it didn’t host the games directly. Garry’s Mod forced to remove all Nintendo-related content. A Smash Bros tournament shut down for using mods. Streamers hit with takedowns for playing games before the US release date. YouTubers copyright claimed for using Nintendo music.

Japan’s Patent Office rejected Nintendo’s patent for capturing monsters in games, ruling it wasn’t original. Nintendo kept suing Palworld anyway. The US Patent Office is now reexamining Nintendo’s key patent based on prior art, including one of Nintendo’s own earlier patents.

It’s gotten worse since.

Nintendo issued DMCA notices to every Switch emulator on GitHub. Not targeted strikes. All of them. Eden, Citron, Kenji-NX, MeloNX, Sudachi, Suyu, even projects that were already inactive. The notices came in waves until nothing remained.

The emulators don’t contain Nintendo code. They don’t distribute games. They’re tools that can run software on non-Nintendo hardware, which has been legal since Sony v. Connectix established the precedent. Nintendo’s argument is that because the emulators could theoretically be used to play pirated games, their existence violates copyright.

One team refused to comply. The developers behind Eden filed a counter-notice and moved their code elsewhere. Nintendo hasn’t sued them yet. The standoff continues.

The Irony

PokéNational Geographic operated for three years without incident. Elious wasn’t hiding. Major gaming outlets had featured his work. He recently launched a Patreon so fans could support him, and speculation is that this triggered Nintendo’s attention.

The strikes cite “Pokémon video games, including the audio-visual works, characters, and imagery.” Elious argues he used none of that except brief audio clips that should qualify as fair use. The strikes target entire videos, including sections containing no Pokémon at all.

Here is what makes this case sting: AI-generated Pokémon channels, some directly copying Elious’s documentary format, remain online. Three years of handmade animation, destroyed. Algorithmic content farms using his concept, untouched.

Nintendo struck the artist. The imitators are fine.

What Used to Be Inspiration

Video game historian John Szczepaniak, lecturing at TechnoCampus University in Spain, reported that students described genuine anxiety about Nintendo’s litigation. Young creators are afraid to explore ideas that might attract Nintendo’s attention.

This is the transformation. Nintendo once meant imagination, possibility, the dream of making games. A generation grew up wanting to create because of Mario and Zelda and Pokémon. Now that generation fears Nintendo’s lawyers more than any other company in gaming.

Frank Cifaldi, founder of the Video Game History Foundation, has condemned Nintendo’s approach to preservation. When Nintendo forces ROM sites to surrender all content, it destroys archives of games from defunct publishers. Nintendo’s defensiveness over its own IP makes preservation of all gaming history harder.

Stephen McArthur, a lawyer specialising in video games, noted that most major publishers have guidelines for fan content. Riot Games, Bethesda, Valve, Rockstar, Sega. They set boundaries. They distinguish between threats and tributes. Nintendo’s blanket prohibition, McArthur said, is “legally unnecessary and also a terrible business and marketing policy.”

Former Nintendo president Satoru Iwata expressed interest in fan content guidelines. He died before they happened. They still haven’t.

The Same Question

Is fan art legal? People search this constantly. They’re worried about their work, their passion projects, their tributes to games they love. They want to know if creating something could get them sued.

The answer depends entirely on who owns what you love.

Lovers of Sonic, Sega will probably leave you alone. Hardcore Halo fans could be hired by , Microsoft . If you love Pokémon, you have maybe three years before Nintendo notices. The lucky ones will get a cease-and-desist. If you’re not, you’ll wake up to 20 copyright strikes and no recourse.

Elious is done making Pokémon content. He’ll keep animating, but nothing Nintendo-related. Three years of work, erased. A hundred thousand subscribers, gone. A portfolio piece he used to get jobs, unusable.

Nintendo won. Nintendo always wins.

Is fan art legal? Not if Nintendo owns it.