Nintendo is notorious for its historically ferocious protection of its intellectual properties. While they have stated that they don't mind fan output
per se, they will come down on works that "diminish the dignity" of their properties or infringe on their ability to make money. This means that they tend to come down particularly hard on explicit works, Game Mods, and Fan Games, though they have a history of all sorts of crackdowns.
- Nintendo was widely criticized for issuing a cease-and-desist letter towards the makers of a Zelda-based Fan Film called The Hero of Time. A post on the fan film's now-defunct website seems to indicate that the makers of the film weren't too upset about the situation and were fairly understanding of Nintendo's perspective on the matter.
- For a period of time, Nintendo seemed to be sending constant cease-and-desist letters to all sorts of Pokémon hentai fansites, which hit their peak alongside the franchise's peak in popularity during the late 1990s and early 2000s. After a very brief misunderstanding with the site Suicide Girlsexplanation , they're more lenient with how they approach the issue nowadays. The main exception to the leniency happens around the time of releasing new games, as Nintendo becomes very aggressive about taking down or otherwise heckling any and all Pokémon Rule 34 until about a month after the game's release. This is likely due to them not wanting a young child to stumble across NSFW Pokémon art while looking for information about the new games.
- In addition to Pokémon Rule 34, Nintendo has also taken down many Pokémon fangames, with the most notable case being Pokémon Uranium. They even sent a cease and desist letter to Pixelmon, a Pokémon mod for Minecraft - while this did shut down the original mod, its assets were used to create new incarnations that Nintendo has yet to react to.
- Nintendo has gone so far as to obtain the rights to Super Hornio Bros. specifically so they can ensure that it will never see a re-release.
- While it was never actually taken down by Nintendo, the company acted very wary of Project M, a Game Mod of Super Smash Bros. Brawl designed to play more like Melee and be more suited to Tournament Play. For a time, players could be banned automatically from the Miiverse network just for typing "Project M" or even "PM" (ostensibly for discussing "criminal activity"). While the competitive Smash community was waiting for the cease-and-desist notice for years, it never came; this is generally believed by the Smash community to be caused by Nintendo not wanting to alienate the competitive community in the runup to Smash 4. When Nintendo became an official sponsor for Apex 2015, a popular tournament series heavily featuring Smash games, Project M was removed from the tournament's lineup. In the end, the makers of Project M decided to end it on their own terms, albeit due to their growing fears of Nintendo suing them.
- Nintendo hit Another Metroid 2 Remake (a fan-made remake of Metroid II: Return of Samus) with a DMCA takedown notice just two days after its release - though at that point, fans were able to keep the game alive. It was later revealed that the takedown was at least somewhat driven by the fan game being released while Nintendo was developing their own Metroid II remake, which was released the following year as Metroid: Samus Returns.
- Nintendo issued a DMCA takedown notice against the website GameJolt, which caused a whopping 562 games hosted on the site to be removed. GameJolt, for its part, claims that "[d]evelopers affected by takedown notices should never lose data," so it remains to be seen what the final fate of these games will be.
- They send a cease-and-desist letter to the website Undiscovered Playthings, a website dedicated to pictures of bootleg toys, to take down their collection of Pokémon toys. Apparently, they believed that the site was encouraging the sale of bootlegs of their products, which the site's owner believed was a wildly inaccurate assessment of the site (though he did remove the Pokémon collection from the site).
- Breath of the NES was a fan game inspired by the NES graphics prototype of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Nintendo sent the creators a cease-and-desist, so the game was briefly shut down while they addressed the issue. After a while, the game was released with different graphics than the NES prototype... and Nintendo sent out another cease-and-desist, causing the game to be shut down entirely.
- Zelda30Tribute was a fan-made browser game based on The Legend of Zelda, with the original game's sprites presented in 3D. Shortly after its release, Nintendo sent out a cease-and-desist towards the fan game, forcing the creator to shut down the game.
- On February 2021, Nintendo filed a cease-and-desist order against Logan Thirtyacre, the creator of SuperMarioLogan for the wildly inappropriate usage of the Mario characters in his videos. Because of this, the Mario characters were permanently replaced by the original puppets introduced in 2019, and given new names (i.e. Mario became Marvin), while the show is now known simply as SML. On July 8th of the same year, the original Super Mario Logan channel was deleted, along with thirteen years' worth of videos. However, many fans of the series have put the effort into archiving, and most of the videos have been re-uploaded on their channels.
- Popular modding website Nexus Mods put out a statement proactively banning mods for Palworld that added Pokémon to the game due to legal concerns regarding Nintendo and their prior treatment of certain fan content, after an incident where a modder that did just that had their video showcasing the mod taken down by Nintendo.
