A fun sounding project, a Nintendo 64 demake from portal, has been removed from Steam. However, the developer implores people not to get angry with Valve, suggesting his idea was doomed from the start. And yet, you know, I’m still a little angry.
Valve likes to portray itself as the great libertarian force in gaming everything goes (until it doesn’t), is defiant Pro you (apart from if it is not so) and tons of other confusing, contradictory positions. But the one area where The Man always seems like it’s going to be an instant hit is when Nintendo is involved. Why the Portal 64 Demake was so quickly removed from Steam.
You might be thinking, “Of course Valve did that! portal is their IP, so it only makes sense that they would stop others from using it.” Oddly enough, however, that’s not the reason why James Lambert’s fan project was shut down. This is because the game uses the N64’s SDK library, Liultra.
Lambert is extremely level-headed and sensible in this entire situation. In a video uploaded to his channel, Lambert explained that Valve had reached out to him about this Portal 64– a demake of Valve’s game that was intended to run as an unofficial Nintendo 64 game – to say that he had to get it from Steam because of Nintendo’s own libraries on which it was based. The developer quickly insists, “Don’t be mad at Valve.”
And he’s right! It’s stupid to be mad at Valve. It’s like being angry at the sea, but when the sea is made up of people who never respond to emails. As Lambert points out, Valve doesn’t want to put itself in a situation where it appears to be supporting a game that does this could Violating Nintendo’s copyrights and becoming a target for Nintendo’s notoriously feisty lawyers.
Anyway, it could.
That won’t be the case, and it has been even worse in the past, like when it happened chased the GameCube and Wii emulator together, Dolphin, from his shop. This case involved the “Wii Common Key,” software that was supposedly only available by cracking the Wii and was used to decrypt the discs in the physical machine. But in this case, Nintendo wouldn’t object to releasing the emulator first Valve reached out to Nintendo to evaluate the project.
The whole recent debacle would make some sense if it was about ripping off Switch games or something similar. But this incident re Portal 64 is about making a game for a console that Nintendo hasn’t made or sold since 2004 – and a game that hasn’t tried to pass itself off as a Nintendo product. It simply doesn’t hurt Nintendo and can’t hurt it in any way.
Lambert points out that even a port to Libdragon – a non-proprietary version of the SDK – would likely still allow Valve to appear to be “supporting” a project that, in some unspecified sense, is the Infringed Nintendo’s rights. He also mentions how vanishingly unlikely it is that Nintendo would ever give the project its blessing. And, you know, the guy made a game based on one company’s IP and another company’s IP. If anything was always doomed to fail, it was this.
All such projects are described as being in “legal gray areas”, but this means that no one has ever gone to court for review. Nintendo would have a surprisingly difficult time proving that developing new games that run on 30-year-old hardware that they don’t intend to profit from violates the DMCA or other corporate protection laws. Obviously Lambert is unable to prove this. But you know, Valve is.
It won’t. It could cost the company a fortune. But it would certainly be good if it were like that. If someone did. We asked Valve why the company doesn’t want to do this.
The good news is that James Lambert is using this as an opportunity to work on something new, his own property, and develop it together for PC and N64 so that it can be released on Steam without encountering similar problems. In the meantime, the following could have happened:
