Nintendo asks Apple to remove Duck Hunt clone
IP protection wars begin
iPhone developer Lawl Mart put together a quite excellent homage to the Nintendo Entertainment System’s classic Zapper game, Duck Hunt, which was released in January. According to Macworld, however, Nintendo has stepped in to protect its popular IP and asked Apple to remove Duck Hunt from the App Store.
The game was recently released as a download for the Wii, which is presumably one of the reasons Nintendo has been quick to remove Duck Hunt from the iPhone’s game catalogue. Since it’s unlikely that Nintendo will ever release its own iPhone games, this is presumably a new avenue of legal surveillance that iPhone competitors will now be watching.
The influx of home brew and independent game development the App Store encourages has inevitably led to emulation, porting and cloning of popular intellectual properties from across the games industry – a whole series of open Game & Watch clones can currently be found on the App Store, though Nintendo has yet to demonstrate any awareness of them – though this removal of Duck Hunt could signify the beginning of the end for the iPhone’s Wild West era.
But it needn’t spell doom for the indie programmer, either. The protection of intellectual property is a vital necessity in any creative industry, and now the iPhone developer will simply have to dig a little deeper when drawing on inspirational titles.
Developer Lawl Mart has promised a revised (and presumably renamed) edition of his game, which should be back on the App Store and earning in no time.
