There were some very elaborate copy-protection schemes. Like, “go to page 12 in the manual and enter the word at the bottom of the page”. Of course, people could just share what the word was, so some games did stuff like having a fucking codewheel in the manual, instead. So you had to take the code the game gave you, turn the wheel to the correct spot, and then enter the result the wheel gave you.
“The legendary Flappy Bird is back and will fly higher than ever on Solana as it soars into Web 3.0 … Flappy Bird will now be the world’s first open-source, community owned web2 and web3 game … Build, create, play and stake to own,” the landing text reads.
It’s…Flappy…Bird. WTF are they on about?! The game is already one step below Pac-Man. This is like trying to monetize Pong.
As long as it’s a mod and not a full game, it should be fine. Typically these are distributed as patch files that don’t contain any Nintendo assets and you have to provide your own ROM and patch it yourself.
Where people get in trouble is when they try to make a full game (as opposed to a mod), like that Metroid game that was shut down awhile back.
Exploding toilets? I’m there!!