One of my favorite installments of Smash Bros. isn’t an official one. It’s the fan-made Project M, a mod of the slow, defense-oriented Brawl into a quicker, combo-filled fighting game. Apart from being possibly the most complete mod in all of gaming history, Project M also has countless Easter eggs and surprises, from subtle nods to certain games, to hidden stage elements, to secret taunts, all for the dedicated community that built itself up from scratch, proving PM to be a Smash game all of its own.

Another thing that separates PM from, say, Sm4sh, is the legality of it. PM, to put it bluntly, isn’t really allowed to exist. While simply a mod of a game, it still uses Nintendo intellectual property, and throughout the six years PM has been in development, the Dev Team had to constantly look over their shoulder and make every decision with Nintendo in mind. This battle, which culminated in an announcement last Tuesday, was the source of much dismay in the PM community. This is Keeping Up with the KarSmashians #4: PMDT, Plz Fix.

The PMDT Announces Their Disbandment

Two weeks ago, PM was looking stronger than ever. Version 3.6 had proven to be the most balanced, and had started making a comeback in tournaments, with Paragon 2015 hosting a very successful PM tournament (shoutout to Mr. Lz) right alongside Sm4sh and Melee. The Dev Team was looking towards the future, and was getting ready to release a patch, with new costumes and bug fixes. But all that changed with no warning at all, with the announcement of the team’s end. To quote the official website, which was reduced to nothing more than this sad message:

“Six years ago, we started a journey born out of our shared love for competitive fighting games […] Project M and its community have grown larger than any of us ever anticipated, and it’s truly heartwarming to see all of the unforgettable connections and friendships that have been forged through this project.

Unfortunately, we’re here to say that we’re at the end of that road.”

This message, obviously, left a few questions unanswered. Why did they end so suddenly? Was there a cease & desist from Nintendo? Why is there a lawyer involved? What will happen to the updates you promised us? Tough questions to ask, let alone answer. But I’m here to give a rundown of everything about the situation, and what’s going to happen to Project M.

First off, there was the message, which I already went over. The worried speculation from the PM community began immediately. To your casual reader on /r/ssbpm, this looked like an obvious cease & desist situation. A most likely forced end to PM, the Dev Team apparently not even allowed to talk about it, a lawyer hired, with all questions deferred to him, and even the download link from the website was removed. But the Dev Team would say this wasn’t the case every chance they got. Other theories came around; maybe they were ending because because of an unofficial threat. After all, if Nintendo quietly told the Dev Team they would be sued if they continued working on PM, there isn’t really anything they can do. (“While you’re at it, don’t talk about it and give us bad publicity.”) Or maybe we live in a magical universe where Nintendo saw the Dev Team’s talent and offered them a job (lol). But in any case, it would be a little while before any light was shed on the situation.

Step two of this scenario was the community’s solutions. They decided that the best thing to do would be make a new Dev Team and continue production of PM themselves. A new SubReddit was built to compliment the old one, and to start finding people to work on the next version of PM (it’s dead now – more on that later – but last week it was a madhouse). Everybody and their grandmother wanted in on it, including one former member of the real Dev Team. This brings us to phase three of this heaping helping of SubReddit drama: the Dev Build.

The Dev Build, which was what would eventually turn into the final version of PM, was leaked on this new SubReddit (well, it was leaked on 4chan, but most people found out about it through the SubReddit), and former PMDT member Wiiztec answered questions about it. Wiiztec did an AMA on the SubReddit, and one of the only questions he didn’t know the answer to was why PM is ending. Only a select few members of the Dev Team, according to Wiiztec, actually knew the full truth. This got a lot of conspiracies churning in people’s heads, but more importantly we got this leak of the Dev Build, with unreleased bug fixes, costumes, and NEW CHARACTERS (note: I am not saying that Wiiztec was the one who leaked it), namely Lyn, Knuckles, Isaac, and Sami. All four of them are unfinished, but that’s not the point. The point is whether or not it put the Dev Team in any legal danger. Remember, they took down the downloads for every previous and current version, and leaking future versions didn’t do too much to make them happy. This new version to work with on the community’s quest to keep PM alive during this hard time was a silver lining, but it was probably an even darker cloud to the rest of the Dev Team.

Former PMDT member Strong Bad made a Smashboards post about the whole Dev Build situation, asking the new PMDT to reconsider their plans to continue PM, and leave it at ver. 3.6, and to repeat that there was no legal threat from Nintendo, since everyone, including myself, thought otherwise. This was such a foreign situation for PM lovers. We were used to people like GimR going out of their way to stop PM from happening (nothing against The GimZ; the situation was more complicated than that), but now the Dev Team themselves were telling us to stop. This finally made the new PMDT realize what they were doing by continuing PM: endangering the people who had given countless hours to their favorite game. They posted a message explaining what they’re going to do, and how they’re going to do it. To quote:

“[…] We will still release a glitch free, working version of 3.61 and will re-brand it as the Project M Community Build as the gold finished build. After that we are going to discard the Project M name altogether to protect the old dev team as well as giving our new team the freedom to work on our own mod.

Our mod will be based off of the leaked dev mod however, but we will make it our own. We will rebalance and rework the cast over time, we will add new fighters, costumes, textures, music, and aesthetics (in fact, we’ve already done a ton of work as it is). We are still working on a name, so for now lets refer to it as Evolution.”

To me, it looks like the real Dev Team got the wish they thought they would never want: PM is stopping. The game was to be quietly updated one last time, by non-members of the real PMDT. And then it will finally stop, and hopefully let the metagame evolve, and have a final version to play and enjoy for years. But this was the start of a new project, the “Evolution” mentioned in the post, with extra measures taken to ensure the safety of the original Dev Team.

Mewtwo2000, another former PMDT member, described his thoughts on his Facebook and spread a little bit of truth. Keeping secrets didn’t do too much besides make people hungry for more information to the point where they’d make up their own problems to go with their solutions. He finally gave some actual news on what happened to make PM end so suddenly: it was all a preventative measure and nothing more. The Dev Team had always known right from the beginning that there was a threat of a cease & desist from Nintendo. There was no denying that. But they found something that could lead to much worse. To quote the post:

“At some point, it was determined that, even just the fact of releasing the announced patch, PM 3.61, could involve negative actions that nobody in the team could afford at all. A lawyer was contacted and it was confirmed that the possible threats the PMDT could face in an hypothetical legal sue were really terrible.”

I say “something” because we still don’t know what they found. They understandably won’t talk about it, and it’s probably in their best interest to never do so. In fact, this explains why so few Dev Team members knew about this: the less people, the better. Most likely it’s some previously unseen intellectual property deal that made the continuation of PM totally, 100%, no doubt about it, illegal, and actively contributing to the project while aware of this would give Nintendo every right to sue the Dev Team, mainly made up of college students and teenagers, as Mewtwo2000 pointed out. This may not be news anyone wanted to hear, but at the very least, now we know the reason for all the secrecy.

The New PMDT became well aware of the stress that making a project like this would create. I just don’t think they knew how fast it’d affect them. Only a few days after announcing their plans to create an unofficial 3.61 patch, and create Evolution with the Dev Build as a base, in an attempt to save PM, they posted a message announcing the end of that idea. Not only that, Wyre, the man behind Evolution, and this message, warned the community against trying to make their own version of Smash Bros. to replace PM. No doubt he was influenced by Mewtwo2000’s message of the legal threats his Dev Team faced. To quote:

“Right now if we want our game to survive, we need unity. Not a community glitch fix, not a new mod to take its place. A New PMDT threatens a lot of good people and all their hard work as well as the community they created. And those good people aren’t just the PMDT, those people are people like myself. My team can speak for me, I tried my hardest to get this going. And it was going and rolling. But yes, those people are the ones who would get hurt the most.”

What he’s saying makes sense. How could we possibly expect PM to survive when the community is so willing to replace it with something else? There’s a final version of PM right now, we just got caught up in the excitement of the Dev Build, the leaks, the secrecy, and everything else that happened in such short time to notice. Wyre’s message was a reminder of what the real Dev Team had to face for six years, and after barely two days, the new PMDT had to call it quits. Link’s grab will stay buggy forever, and Mr. Game & Watch will have his infinite recovery until the end of time.

Will the Dev Team get their butts sued off? I don’t know. Will Evolution ever be a reality? I also don’t know. All I know is it was a wild ride for PM fans (this is probably the longest Shield article ever [Ed. Note – second-longest, and it may lose that spot in this very issue], and it’s the condensed version of what happened. I could have gone on for another page about what 47 meant). The future of PM looks shaky, and I hope that, at the very least, things like this article informing people of the status of PM will help. I’m going to leave you with one last message: Project M is far from dead. It will only die if the thousands of people who have been playing it leave the game. And there’s things you, a casual Shield reader, can do to help, namely joining the PM community. It still exists, and no one can really do anything about that. Get ver. 3.6, and see why it’s so amazing (The Morales may not like me posting a download link for a game of questionable legal stance on The Shield [Ed. Note: correct, or even talking about it], so this is up to you), follow Smashboards if you want more information on this, get Dolphin Emulator if you don’t have a Wii to play on, join Anther’s Ladder if you have no one to play against. Just simply playing the game can help. And PM needs it now more than ever.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy the rest of The Shield.