Nintendo has shut down another fan-made Pokémon based game, sending a cease-and-desist order to open source MMO Pokénet. The order demands that the site be taken down and that the pokedev.org domain name be surrendered, claiming unauthorized use of Nintendo trademarks.
Pokénet was a work in progress that was already running online and had the "Valiant Venonat" version of the beta close to release. "Nushio", one of the developers of the game, told Joystiq that over 7,000 players had logged into the game where everyone is a Pokémon trainer traveling the world’s Kanto and Johto regions.
The takedown of the site was demanded in March, but the developers waiting until yesterday to finally bring the site to an end.
"We kinda postponed closing the site, but after much talks within the devs, we decided to ‘formally’ close it down," said Nushio. "On April Fools, no less."
The developers apparently did not expect the site to meet its end this way.
"Of course not. Truth be told, we’re not the only ‘Poké-MMO-n’ around this side of the net," Nushio stated. "We (were?) however, the only one that handed out the source code to whoever wanted it. I’m not sure if that’s the reason they attempted to shut us down or not."
When it came to maintaining the site, Nushio told Joystiq that the developers paid $80 a month out of pocket for the past 24 months to keep the servers and site going. The group isn’t quite sure what they will do with the game’s code.
"We joked around using Digimon, or Monster Rancher as our next targets, but most of the devs are just giving up," Nushio said. "There’s still people tied to the Pokemon MMO genre, and they might try to revive it though, who knows. The code is out of the bag, and anyone can start a new game and server quite easily.
There’s still developers on our team that are waiting on us to say ‘Haha, we gotcha! It was all a joke.’"
[Joystiq]
