5 Incredible Fan-Made Video Games Killed By Legal Action

Super Smash Bros continues to grow and grow in scope as a franchise, with speculation rife about who will take the 89th and final spot on Ultimate’s roster in a few months time.

Said roster has grown exponentially since the original game (which boasted twelve fighters) in 1999. Melee is still often cited as the high point of the series, though the Wii release of Brawl brought online battling into the equation for the first time, allowing Masahiro Sakurai's creation to really take off in competitive circles.

The somewhat unbalanced and random nature of Brawl’s gameplay led to fan development of a mod that utilised Brawl’s engine but with Melee’s mechanics. Christened Project M, it reintroduced characters from Melee that had been omitted from Brawl and its demo build launched in 2011 to great fanfare, being downloaded more than a million times.

Unlike most of the other projects on this list, which were killed almost immediately upon being showcased to the world, Project M managed to survive until 2015, when it was shut down without warning. It was denied that Nintendo were behind the move, but the fact that potential future legal issues were cited and any reference made to the game on Nintendo’s official forums resulted in a ban makes it fairly simple to read between the lines.

A successor, Project+, which includes Knuckles the Echidna as an original character, has somehow not met the same fate since its 2019 release, remaining playable for the curious.