Nintendo Calls for Removal of 20 Years' Worth of Garry's Mod Content From Steam Workshop

Nintendo's latest legal action is calling for the removal of 20 years' worth of Garry's Mod content from Steam Workshop.

Facepunch Studios posted on Valve's gaming platform where it confirmed that the takedown requests were legitimate. This comes as there have been prior takedown requests this year that were believed to have come from a fraudster.

Taking Down Garry's Mod Content

Nintendo Calls for Removal of 20 Years Worth of Garry's Mod Content From Steam Workshop — Nintendo has reportedly called for the takedown of 20 years' worth of Garry's Mod content from Steam Workshop.
(Photo : Facepunch Studios / Screenshot taken from Steam)

The studio also said that the request was "fair enough" given that the content found on Steam Workshop does belong to Nintendo. However, it noted that the process of removing everything will take time as they have "20 years of uploads to go through."

Facepunch Studios urged players to help them by deleting their Nintendo-related uploads and never uploading them ever again. The Japanese gaming company has had a history of being extremely protective of its owned content.

In the last year, Nintendo has issued legal challenges to Palworld Pokemon mods, a popular Switch emulator, and a Nintendo 64 Portal revival. The latter of these used the official Nintendo 64 SDK, according to IGN.

All of these things factor into Nintendo's takedown request for Garry's Mod content not being at all surprising for many gamers. What is somewhat shocking is how long it took for the video game company to actually make any effort to have the content removed.

Two decades is a relatively long time to let mods as blatant and damaging as Mario touting guns or turning Waluigi into a weapon run rampant in the world. Particularly, Garry's Mod is a very popular thing among gamers as it lets them put together characters and items into its sandbox to create weird scenarios.

There is no actual telling the full breadth of Nintendo-related add-ons that people have uploaded for Garry's Mod. However, a quick search for the term "Mario" on the Steam Workshop returns nearly 6,000 results across 188 pages. This is also just one corner of Nintendo's IP library, which shows the overall scale of the takedown efforts.

Nintendo's Legal Efforts

Nintendo's lawyers have been particularly busy in the last year or two amid a takedown of images for emulators, the death of the Zelda: Breath of the Wild multiplayer mod, and the shutdown of the Yuzu Switch emulator, said GamesRadar.

Garry's Mod is a highly popular 2006 sandbox game that came from the modding scene around Valve's Source software. There have been models of countless Nintendo mascots that have been ported to the Source engine over the years.

Facepunch Studio's latest announcement came as Nintendo-themed add-ons started to be taken down a few months ago. At the time, the company did not divulge any details or issues regarding the takedowns.

Since then, the process of removing the Nintendo-themed content on Garry's Mod has been "ongoing" and the developers of the sandbox game are still hard at work in taking down all of them, according to Kotaku.

The development means that players will have to say goodbye to making various weird scenarios, such as jumpscare horror games that feature Kirby inside Garry's Mod.