Popular Pokemon Fan Game Site Has Been Taken Offline

gamerant.com:

Relic Castle, a popular website dedicated to creating and curating Pokemon fan games, has been taken offline following a DMCA. The long-running Pokemon franchise has inspired plenty of creativity among its legions of fans over the past few decades, from impressive artwork of creatures like Pikachu and Eevee to fan-made spin-off games that place the series in genres that likely wouldn’t be explored by Game Freak. This includes mods that add Pokemon characters to other video games like Minecraft and custom Pokemon games that recreate Ash Ketchum’s journey in the Pokemon anime.

Unfortunately for the people behind these Pokemon fan projects, Nintendo and The Pokemon Company are notoriously protective of its IP, and this has led to the company shutting down certain fan games over the past few years. In 2022, video clips of a fan-made Pokemon FPS were taken down after threats of legal action by the Big N. More recently, The Pokemon Company ordered that a Pokemon-themed Palworld mod be removed, though it would later be reinstated after the creators altered and renamed its character models to look less like the copyrighted Pokemon characters.

Relic Castle could be the latest casualty of The Pokemon Company's growing crackdown on Pokemon fan games, as the popular site has been taken offline. This news was announced in a message on the Relic Castle Twitter account earlier this week, which stated that the site was taken down following a DMCA notice. The message didn’t specify if The Pokemon Company was behind this copyright notice, but the creators expressed regret that Relic Castle had been shut down just as it was about to celebrate its 10th anniversary. While the website itself is no longer online, the Relic Castle Discord server will remain active, and Relic Castle can still be accessed as an archive through the Wayback Machine.

Relic Castle was originally set up in 2014, and included a forum dedicated to discussing and curating popular Pokemon fan games alongside a directory