By Nelson Schneider - 09/14/25 at 03:38 PM CT
Oh dear, it seems that the little toy company that saved gaming from itself after the Crash of 1983 has finally come full-circle and completed its transformation into just another Evil Corporate Person out to take advantage of every situation and exploit every legal loophole in order to entrench and enrich itself.
We’ve grown used to the constant noise from Nintendo’s legal team attempting to squash legal emulation and issuing Cease and Desist letters to long-time fans who just want to create Indie homages to the Nintendo games that proved to be such big influences on them, and on gaming as a whole. Nintendo’s transformation into a draconian, totalitarian control freak has been on full display in other ways, as well, with them putting the kibosh on allowing Nintendo console owners to backup their own save and game data locally after modders exploited that capability to run homebrew code on the Wii almost 20 years ago.
Sadly, Nintendo’s efforts to exert control over gaming just went overboard, with a new patent the company applied for and successfully won from the United States Patent Office. The patent in question involves “summoning,” and while the wording in the official documentation makes it quite clear that Nintendo is thinking specifically about ‘Pokemon’ with regard to this patent, the broad and vague wording of the document also makes it so that it can be applied to literally ANY game mechanic where the player can call forth any number of disposable minions to aid in a combat situation.
PC Gamer Magazine quoted a videogame patent lawyer in calling the awarding of this patent “an embarrassing failure of the US patent system.” I, personally, consider that to be something of an understatement. The American copyright and patent systems have both been stretched and distorted far beyond their original intended use by the immortal corporate entities that have – themselves – had an unfortunately enormous effect on modern culture. Awarding a broad, vaguely-defined patent to a foreign company is definitely an “embarrassing failure” on its own. Awarding such a patent when there are UNCOUNTABLE examples of Prior Art goes beyond “failure” into complete and utter dysfunction and uselessness.
There have been games that have included “summoning” mechanics that date back to BEFORE the first ‘Pokemon’ title graced the (Super) Game Boy in the late ‘90s. If you disregard the fact that Nintendo’s patent is specifically for a “videogame implementation” of “summoning,” it’s possible to trace the origin of “summoning” disposable minions as a game mechanic all the way back to Original Dungeons & Dragons, with some spells like Summoning, Summon Insects, Monster Summoning, and Call Woodland Beings. Any videogame adaptation of D&D automatically includes “summoning” as Prior Art... And the basis of that Prior Art can be traced back to the 1970s, before Nintendo even became a videogame company!
So, no, this failure of the U.S. Patent System isn’t just “embarrassing,” it’s absolutely grotesque, vile, and corrupt to its very core. We need to pressure our politicians to change the policy on members of the Judiciary being appointed for life and really clean house on the Intellectual Property courts, as it is clear that, not only are the men (and women) behind the curtain not doing their primary jobs of protecting and representing the best interests of the American people, but they have no idea how to interpret obvious and basic instances of both Prior Art and Unpatentable Concepts.
And while we’re at it, maybe it’s high time we told Nintendo to take a hike and stopped supporting their disgusting, gold-digging endeavors. If you have a Nintendo Network subscription of any kind, maybe now’s a good time to think about cutting them off. If you still collect physical Switch and/or Switch 2 games, maybe consider buying them second-hand. We can fight back as a community against such overweening overreach, and with the Switch 2 being so boring and milquetoast, we won’t even be missing out on anything.
