Super Mario Bros battle royale hit by DMCA takedown, now Infringio Royale

The inevitable has happened. Last week, YouTuber and programmer InfernoPlus released Mario Royale, a 100-player battle royale race based on the original Super Mario Bros. Yesterday, as expected, Nintendo issued a DMCA Takedown notice. But that doesn't mean the game is done for: it now exists in a DMCA-compliant form called Infringio Royale, and it still has more than 1,000 concurrent players.

"Fuck. It happened. Please bear with us while we fix the game over the next few days," reads the patch notes from yesterday. Currently, it's very plain and sparse with a generic art style and lots of invisible objects, but InfernoPlus says it will be looking "a lot better" in a few days. "It's not pretty but hopefully it won't get me sued," he said on Twitter.

That hasn't put people off playing it. It took me less than five seconds to find a game, and as I write this there are 1,100 players online. It's receiving updates and tweaks every day—the player count for each round has been reduced from 100 to 75 to alleviate performance issues, and you can now rebind controls for both keyboard and controller.

As a reminder, you can't directly interact with other players in Infringio Royale, but you can affect them via the world, such as by breaking blocks they're standing on, or firing green shells at them. The idea is to be the first to reach the end of a three-stage world. Rounds are fast, with most players dying within a minute, and you're booted instantly back to the menu so you can load up another round. Once it has been fixed, it'll be worth a quick go. You can play it here.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.