The theory that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery is about to be formally tested in a Japanese court of law. The big news for gaming fans of late is that the Kyoto-based video-gaming giant Nintendo has just instituted legal proceedings against the far smaller rival publisher Pocketpair over the content of its hit recent title Palworld, often described as being “Pokémon with guns”. As Nintendo own exclusive rights to the Pokémon series, Pocketpair’s bright idea of handing over Kalashnikovs and Mausers to Clefairy and Psyduck was unsurprisingly deemed by Nintendo’s lawyers to breach the firm’s intellectual copyright.
Yet this is far from the weirdest such lawsuit Nintendo has ever been involved in. If you don’t know, the incredibly popular games in question involve players wandering a cartoon world and capturing cute little animal-like creatures called Pokémon inside magical balls, before tooling them up to fight one another in battles against competing Pokémon trainers. It is now 25 years since the original Japanese GameBoy titles in the series were released in America, an occasion celebrated earlier this year by the ‘Pocket Monsters’ making the front cover of Time magazine, the excuse being that, so popular are the critters, they are now the highest-earning global media franchise ever, raising $100 billion in revenue up to 2021.
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