Game Freak has been allegedly hacked, with source codes for Pokemon games reportedly leaked

simple@lemm.ee to Games@lemmy.world – 747 points –
Game Freak has been allegedly hacked, with source codes for Pokemon games reportedly leaked
gbatemp.net
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Terabytes of the same game, just in different colors.

Sort of. The same game, over and over, each time in a different colour, each time with a higher pixel density, each time a little bit worse.

Which is exactly why I stopped playing after Gen 2, which was the peak of the series IMO. If you want to see everything the series has to offer, just play Gold/Silver (or their remakes on the DS). No reason to waste time and money on any other Pokémon game.

Gen 4 was peak IMO, both the new Pokemon were excellent as well as the best remakes ever made. Gen 4 has Platinum and HeartGold SoulSilver which are the best games in the series.

Radical Red and Polished Crystal are peak, in my opinion. I can't go back to the lack of special/physical split, it's just awful.

Have you tried Unbound?

I have! It was great as well. I think it's my favorite original romhack so far. I'm planning on playing Insurgence next, although that's a fan-game as opposed to real romhack.

I've got Insurgence, and Reborn ready to go as soon as I get through Unbound! I'm glad you've been able to enjoy these so much! As soon as Did You Know Gaming released a video about Nintendo taking down fan games and rom hacks, I immediately went and got as many of the more polished and lauded ones as soon as I possibly could! :)

I really liked Prism. And I don't know, Radical Red just played different from how I like my single player pokemon experience.

Pokemon Black/White 1 & 2 are as close to that as you want. Great story, amazing songs that i still hum to this day, and the designs are as solid as Gen 1 and 2.

Next headline "Hackers disappointed that the hacked source code is apparently just the same as the last 16 games"

In my head this is a retribution for financing hackers that attacked Internet Archive and nobody can convince me otherwise

Nintendo was responsible for that?

It's like Lenin said, you look for the person who will benefit... And, uh... You know, you'll, uh... You know what I mean.

The Dude

„Who benefits the most” from attacking Internet Archive? Big copyright holders whose content was distributed via Internet Archive. The reason given by the group claiming responsibility is so silly I don’t believe it.

[edit] I’ll add to this comment so that I don’t have to reply to everyone specifically.

I don’t believe that if you wanted to attack USA (as people claiming responsibility did) you’d attack it in a way that benefits big corporations most. It sounds like a flimsy distraction from true perpetrators.

You can believe what you want, but there's absolutely no way you would be correct. Any large company sponsoring a cyber attack, if caught, would be nailed to the wall and made an example of. The extreme risks are simply not worth the comparatively small reward of reducing a tiny fraction of piracy.

A more realistic and reasonable avenue would have been to sponsor the companies going after IA for copyright infringement as a result of them loaning out unlimited digital copies of books without DRM.

This is a very valid point, yet companies do shady stuff all the time and some even get caught via subpoenas and such. Nintendo can do it in a way that will never be noticeable on their books for sure.

For those curious, this account on Xitter claimed responsibility. Their stated reasons are indeed ridiculous, but I don't at all have a hard time believing that people can be that misguided.

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This is a conspiracy theory I'm completely behind. With all the moves Nintendo has made recently this was the first thing I thought when Internet Archive was compromised

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Patent the code and sue Nintendo when they release the game.

You can't patent code, and it's automatically copyright protected. Nintendo just needs to prove they wrote the code originally, which should be easy.

You can patent the features that the code makes up.

Also, Nintendo has patented features existing in other games long before, and it hasn't stopped them. The current lawsuit against palworld contains patent claims for features they do not actually own, which is why they need 100 different lawsuits coming their way so they get a taste of their own medicine.

They have an easy time suing one or two entities, but 100 different ones will have a significant economic impact.

Good. Couldn't have happened to a worse company other than Nintendo.

Now people can verify if Gamefreak's excuses for not including all Pokemon in each game since the Switch games are real. And verify how low effort their games are.

Nintendo aren't the worst company. Not even the worst gaming company. Not when they have competition like Ubisoft and Warner Brothers and EA and Activision.

Of course, if it weren't for the presence of the aforementioned companies, Nintendo would be the worst.

I mean they take like 33% of that guy named bowser’s life earnings. Which are severely reduced because they also got him thrown in jail for a felony.

That’s pretty uniquely evil

That’s hardly unique when damages exceed what a person can pay, wage garnishing is actually relatively common.

Nintendo also gave Gary Bowser a warning and he signed an agreement saying he would stop his illegal activities… and then he continued anyway.

They gave him an out at no cost and instead he landed himself in prison because he fucked around and found out.

I agree that bowser brought the final outcome on himself, however, that does not expunge Nintendo of guilt.

They continue to collect their 30% or however much it is.

In what way is Nintendo guilty?

If you read the above thread and don't see it, it's because they're overly vindictive. Garnishing someone's wages is obscene when they're so incredibly rich. They don't even need it

That’s just punitive damages awarded by the court and also isn’t unusual.

I don't know why people defend Gary Bowser like he is an innocent dude. He was part of a Hacker Group that hacked Nintendo Switch, 3DS, GameCube, NES Classic, Xbox and Xbox 360, PlayStation. They SOLD the hacked device's. He wasn't your Neighbor that hacked your Switch for a beer. They made Business with it for 10 years. Besides that, Nintendo wasn't the Person who decided the sentence. It was a Judge. What do you think Nintendo should do? The Judge ruled him for Prison and 14.5 Million and Nintendo says publicly: "No thanks." Yeah the sentence is way to hard, but the problem is the law and the Judge.

As I mentioned in other comments, I have no illusions that Gary Bowser is innocent or didn’t bring this all on himself. It’s his own fault he kept doing what he was doing.

However, the court doesn’t follow Gary from job to job initiating the process to garnish his wages.

It’s nintendo who is continuing to persecute Gary at this point, not the courts. Garnishing someone’s minimum wage job as a billion dollar corporation is uniquely evil.

I could be wrong, but I have not seen anything remotely close from EA, activision, blizzard, Microsoft, Sony, etc. and my original point was this is uniquely evil to Nintendo.

Sony in the early 2000 was going crazy for Modchips for PS2. They had multiple Cord cases in Europe, in multiple countries and many People needed to pay money in different Country's.

Later in 2011 George Hotz hacked the PS3, Sony warned him and he stopped. So we don't know how it would have ended if Sony and George ended up in Cord.

Nintendo also warned Team Xecuter multiple times but the Team wasn't interested in stopping. There isn't much difference between PlayStation and Nintendo.

As bad as they are, EA isn't sending lawyers to every fan project that revives their old games, they are just regular greedy, not petty greedy. Ubisoft to this day ignores Rayman Redemption too.

I'd say they're not even the worst of the big three console manufacturers. The stuff Microsoft and Sony do to the gaming industry is just as bad, but that's ignoring that they both have their fingers in a lot of other technological pies where they do some really bad shit.

Source code is only for HG/SS and B2W2, so we still can't verify anything about the newer genes

Damn. Too bad. But those are both interesting games to have the source code of.

Is the source code for HG/SS the latest or is it from an earlier build?

Now people can verify if Gamefreak’s excuses for not including all Pokemon in each game since the Switch games are real. And verify how low effort their games are.

Wasn't it true, but due to time not technical issues. Basically they keep redoing/remaking from scratch sprites instead of re-using them.

Nah, some folks got a hold of the wire frames for the sprites from the that version and the previous version and showed most were identical. Of those that weren't, many were only slightly modified, and clearly not generated from scratch.

Evidence wouldn't be as concrete as source code, but there was plenty of evidence from data miners. Gamefreak kept moving goal posts when it came to why it wasn't feasible for Sword and Shield to have all the Pokémon which is my frustration with that situation. I think they complained about the capacity of the cartridge the games were stored on was one, which was readily proven wrong. Dont quote me on that. But I do think the situation with the models was ultimately the case.

Nope. The models have stayed the same from X&Y to Sword and Shield. Only in Scarlet and Violet have they been given an upgrade.

Somebody had to find out whether there really was a Mew under the truck in Red and Blue after all.

Someone here recently blew my mind with this video, time for me to pay it forward.

So the glitch never existed but he programmed it in ? Do I understand this right ?

Yeah, from what I can tell, this is basically just what we would now refer to as a "mod".

It’s also a virus, because it can spread from game to game

A virus that only someone with friends can get. So I'm totally immune... heh 😏

Pokemon could be made in RPG maker in like 5 minutes.

Pokemon Infinite Fusion is in fact made in RPG maker and is imo the best Pokemon game out there.

If only I can figure out how to get it running on my Steam Deck.

Does it need an emulator or run as it's own app?

Wonder if I can play it on phone

It'd be a no brainer for me if it was just a romhack.

Gonna have to take a look at it

It's made in RPG maker so it runs its own instance of RPG maker. Someone else posted a guide above.

It's only intended to be played on PC but the guides are from other users who have done their best to come up with workarounds for various platforms.

I thought RPG Maker could do Android versions?

You're posing that hypothetical to the wrong person. All I know is that the dev does not officially support android but does provide a guide to try and get it functioning anyway.

That's probably something a person who has no clue about Pokemon could say. You underestimate how many mechanics older games contain, since like half of them are not obvious for casual players. Although I am not sure about gens newer than IV (Diamond and Pearl is the most recent I've played), since I haven't played them. But most people agree that the best games were around that period (Gen IV, or V), and they only become worse over the years.

It is a menu driven battler that ran on a game boy. It doesn’t take a programming savant to write this, no matter how many mechanics you bolt on top.

I mean, people have already created the majority of their good games from scratch so...

Love how everyone in the comments are shitting on Nintendo and Game Freak lmao

They really, really, really, really earned it.

I swear to god, the Lemmy hive mind is even more intense than their predecessor.

That's like whining that everyone hates Blizzard or Ubisoft because of some hive mind mentality. Could it be that maybe it's just a commonly hated company based off their unethical actions over the last 10+ years?

No, if more than two people are mad at something, it's because of the hive mind or Russian trolls.

Here's the difference though: most people outside of Lemmy don't care about Nintendo's copyright lawsuits enough that it's the only thing they talk about whenever they hear the name. The fact that every comment expresses the same thing is the part that feels like a hive mind. Some criticism of a large corporation is one thing, but how strongly Lemmy holds that opinion feels cultish. Blizzard's leadership protects sex abusers and Ubisoft has had a work culture many describe as nightmarish for decades. Seeing Nintendo put on that level for something not even unique to them makes me think some of you don't know what nuance or perspective are.

I disagree. Nintendo isn't just some company that has legal beef and comparing their shitiness with Blizzard's is like comparing apples to oranges.

Nintendo is a litigious bully and patent troll that has a long, long list of hurting the fans that love their games. They don't just settle for cease and desists, they historically ruin people's lives (see Gary Bowser). What feels even worse about Nintendo is the complete misaligned of their product/ brand vs. how they treat fans. You can point to similar companies like Disney and I say that yes, I would happily cheer on any misfortune that comes to them with the same fervor as Nintendo.

comparing their shitiness with Blizzard's is like comparing apples to oranges.

That's... what I said.

My point is supposed to be that Lemmy acts as a though they're the devil, when in reality they're just the regular amount of corporate shitty. All of what you said is true, and I'm not trying to convince you it isn't. It just feels surreal how every comment in here is the same, like it's the same person behind every username. I get no sense of individuality here, ya know ?

But that whole argument follows the logical fallacy "whataboutism" to downplay X because Y and Z also do bad things. Just because you perceive something to be in line with a standard baseline of corporate shitiness doesn't mean it's not worth criticizing.

As for individualism, it's no secret that lemmy is somewhat left leaning which contributes to the general vibe. From my experience there is a lot more nuance and depth to the discussions that happen here when factoring in population size compared to other similar areas of the internet.

The wider Youtube community is pretty upset Nintendo is trying to get rid of Palworld.

No other company aggressively goes after its fans quite like Nintendo does. Nintendo have not only gone after fan projects made by fans showing their love for their beloved games, but also gone after community-run tournaments that in no way affect Nintendo, etc. Nintendo are pretty awful.

Yes, that's nice and all...but have you tried typing out "Fuck Nintendo" in a comment?

I know you’re being downvoted, but I had the same thought. I see more outcry over nintendo than other companies. Yes, Nintendo has done bad things, but if I were to go back and browse Reddit I feel like the level of hate on Lemmy is much higher. I have to assume it’s due to the open source nature of Lemmy and it’s ideals.

Wow, everyone left another platform and were inspired to leave for the same reason, as a group. Now they're showing extreme similarities in other ways! When will the madness stop??!

I'm waiting in for the headline in a couple days or so:

Another hack at Gamefreak: Hackers upload fixed source codes

Unknown hackers have fixed the frame rate issues while upgrading the graphics quality to the level of the earliest Switch titles like Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

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Don't nobody want that trash codebase.

Hobbyists have made Pokemon clones in their basement for decades. They never needed the source code.

If I'm not mistaken, there's an entire online RPG ran by hobbyists.

It's not about the code. It's about sending a message.

Maybe this was an intentional leak. Now the Nintendo lawyers can claim they've used stolen proprietary code?

Copyright of code doesn't work that way. Now if some idiot goes and uses that code in a game, yeah, they'd have a rough time in court.

If Nintendo thought there was infringement already, and wanted to prove it in court, there are means to securely prove it with redactions and NDA's and so forth as it would be considered trade secret.

They literally never introduce any new concepts to their games I think the last new innovation in the pokemon game is supposed to allow you to have two vs two. That was about 10 years ago I think

I'm so so sorry to do this to you. Double battles were introduced with Ruby and Sapphire... 22 years ago...

Vicious rumor spreading will not be tolerated. The '90s were 15 years ago

I like to shit on Pokemon and Nintendo as much as the rest of them but this isn't really true. Legends: Arceus, while not a great pokemon game overall, introduced several new mechanics, some of which then made their way into Scarlet/Violet. The biggest and best of which, in my opinion, is the ability to catch wild pokemon without battling them.

You have always been able to throw a ball at an unharmed Pokémon to capture it. Just had a very low chance of success unless it was either very low level or it was a great ball or one of the other ones they introduced later. But even back in red and blue you could always try it and it might work.

but you still had to initiate a battle. Unless you're just playing stupid, you should go watch some Arceus gameplay to see what I mean.

I think there are triple battles now. Those might be 10 years old

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

You get what you fucking deserve, Nintendo.

Not even close to enough but at least it's a start!!

Good. Fuck them. Steal everything of value from them.

It's beta builds of old games. It's only valuable to super fans who wanted to see what could have been.

There are leaks of 3 future games also. Gen 10, 11 and a MMO

I thought the leaker saw those and decided to not reveal too many details other than they exist? There's a sentence about it in the article.

Can I already get my hopes up for some PC ports?

Probably not, that'd be piracy, and I'm sure that Nintendo will sue them to hell. 😅

@Dremor@lemmy.world and @simple@lemm.ee.

I'm surely talking out of my rear-end, but isn't possible for an eventual developer to go the way of the SM64 port: having to provide a rom in order to get the assets? As far as I know, those responsible of said port haven't been bothered by Nintendo.

Tor

Tor is only as safe and as secure as the person using it.

Most people think just installing Tor and running protects them and their identity. Most don't even look at things like DNS leaks or think a VPN plus Tor helps, that being said. Tor and Mullvad are probably as private and as secure as you can get by default.

This is bad advice. Using a VPN with tor makes you much easier to track.

Definitely, you don't need a VPN. If you're really worried about your first hop traffic standing out or being blocked, use the obfs4 bridges.

Most people don't make a Pokemon clone and don't need a Tor onion service to stop it getting censored.

Technically yes but I doubt anyone would go through the effort only to be sued into oblivion.

There are a lot of fangames that contain regions and their Pokemon from original games, with some enhancements. You could try these.

Oh no!

Anyways, is that new Palworld island any good

Also design documents like the dude that mated with an octillery lol. The concept of people and pokemon breeding was still referenced in sinoh, but in a way tamer way.

Clearly I've been out of the series too long, what the fuck?

This is what made it in, but there are more of those myths that do get pretty dark for this series that was uncovered in that hack, also a beta build of BW.

We were once Pokemon?

We... Could have been the ones in pokeballs?

We could have... Mated with them?

Don't worry, rule34 has covered that very thoroughly. Both of your questions actually.

We... Could have been the ones in pokeballs?

Just look at Palworld

Jokes aside, I recall hearing that humans are actually canonnically aliens and completely separate from Pokemon

The people who will be most happy to have it would be the wiimmfi team and the devs running pokemon classic network.

They can finally see what the implementation of gen 5 ranked battles and game sync was, instead of having to reverse engineer it all.

Everyone else is probably only interested in asset data, Nintendo switch 2, or finding exploits for homebrew lol.

They can't use this code at all, it would be a surefire way to get the project shut down. Reverse engineering is the only way to operate something like that legally.

They can see how it's done and code their own thing. They don't have to cut and paste the code, just know how its done.

Cleanroom RE is how you prove that's what you did to a court. The point is to avoid into a courtroom with Nintendo at all, making the point moot.

No romhacker or homebrew developer worth their salt will touch any of this. Using leaked material is legally significantly more dangerous than REing. I look forward to seeing the TCRF pages, though.

Ive no interest but hopefully there are torrents soon for those who are interested.

It's a huge deal for hardcore fans, but I am overall against these practices, since they are just illegal, period.

Don't conflate legality with morality.

Why wouldn't torrenting the source code of proprietary software would be a legal issue? I don't care of you do it but I'm curious why you only think it's a moral issue.

Ya got those flipped.

What did I get flipped?

I think their point is that you said "but I am overall against these practices, since they are just illegal", as in you're against something because it's illegal not because it's immoral

Thank you for clearing up my confusion. I felt I missed something. (Also, I didn't post that, I was just confused by the one who replied to it.)

What did I get flipped?

Legality vs morality

Why wouldn’t torrenting the source code of proprietary software would be a legal issue?

It would be a legal issue. But it's not a moral issue, which is why so few people are showing sympathy for Nintendo. They lose nothing if someone gets a copy of the code - there's no victim. They do however have a LONG reputation for weaponizing the legal system by attacking fans with frivolous lawsuits - those DO have a victim, and are therefore a moral issue with Nintendo as the aggressor.

But regardless of context, again don't conflate legality with morality. Ever. History is absolutely stuffed with atrocities that adhere to established law, that doesn't make those atrocities okay. Videogame code is pretty minescule compared to legal attrocities like slavery or the holocost etc, but point remains that the law in-and-of-itself doesn't mean shit.

Also fuck Nintendo.

@smeg@feddit.uk showed me where I was confused. I thought YOU were calling this a moral issue; I just understood your comment wrong.

I am well aware of how Nintendo treats emulator devs, game modders, organizations that make better games in the same genre, and full blown ROM distribution websites exactly the same even though only one of these groups of people are breaking any laws.

I've been holding onto a pet conspiracy theory that BW2 was a last-minute change from Gray, loose ends and plot holes felt too rushed. Curious if the leaked source code will corroborate this.

This is, reportedly, a comment under, reportedly, a post

The leak was confirmed a few hours after the post was made, so it's not just based on reports anymore.

lets go, hope now we get to play these pokemon games on PC

Do you mean natively? Cause the alternative already exists heavily

I tried searching for the new scarlet and violet games, most videos on yt were clickbait... Or I am just bad at searching

So for the rom and emulation side of things the mainline one was YUZU but it got shut down from Nintendo a couple months ago. They were trading and selling that new Zelda game before it came out.

As far as downloading roms, Nintendo is always looking for new sites to shut down that are hosting their IP so good luck. I'm sure there are some piracy reddit and Lemmy resources out there that could help.

As for native PC playing, I doubt in our life times Nintendo will ever release their games on PC.

Now that's really interesting! I wonder where I can go to see this stuff...

Fuck yeah, going to compile me some free Pokémon!

Is there a remind me bot like reddit?

Hopefully not a public one. It would be perfect if it was a direct message (or even better, built in to your client) but all those request comments and responses from the bot were basically spam to everyone else!

I am seeing a lot of negative comments on here and while I agree the franchise has grown stale I can also say the personal emails of employees being leaked is shit and shouldn't happen. Nintendo had to have their day and it came and here we are but it sucks employees are at the butt of the leak.

Also as a fan I welcome competition and games like PalWorld but the classic Pokemon games hold true to my heart and some of these leaks are really dn cool while others set a concerning precedent for what data companies leave laying around and for how long.

For those of you that are interested there are some really interesting things to come out of this for fans.

Source code to games sucks in one manner but gives modders and ROM hackers the opportunity to do many things. It is tools like this Nintendo should have just embraced providing or should allow the community to have community versions to do what they want with it after 25+ years. Maybe it would he less intriguing if those tools were open sourced and the may hidden items were just openly shared. There would be less incentive to steal if they innovated on tools or left old ones to the past to be what they are. However, likewise, legally it is their IP to do with what they want.

Source code is one but straight up editing tools for how they created e-card code for e-card readers. 3DS Dev Kits and Pokemon Beta games sets a whole other wheel in motion and gives players real power to do what will absolutely hurt Nintendo's bottom line and that is develop. That has to be a real wake up call to Nintendo.

Seeing leaks about the anime, movies, and future games is a bummer to me and I don't want any part of that. I would rather those stay a mystery so I can be ready to play them and even if you don't like Pokemon or Nintendo that is fine some of us hate Nintendo and like Pokemon because it was there for us as a child when your parents are going through a divorce. (TMI I know) point there is stuff adult me loves seeing because kid me would never have thought some of this would shed so much light on Nintendo's development and scrapped ideas and processes. While Nintendo should and very much will take action on their IP. I really think if they want to learn from this they will tackle damages on upcoming films, shows, and games. Instead of being embarrassed by old stuff they should just say, "fuck it" and embrace the community doing with it what they want. We are talking about 20 year old data in some cases and tools most people have already debugged, replicated, and deciphered.

That has to be a real wake up call to Nintendo.

That's optimistic thinking. Nintendo doesn't learn, they just bulldoze.

It's great seeing the emails, seeing the team so happy about BW but then receiving the west's criticism of "I can't use charizard for the 5th time in a row :(" was disheartening, so they course corrected with XY and we got that turd.

B/W was the best Pokemon games and the fact so many people got pissy at new material with a solid story and some of the best music to this day, tells me Pokemon fans don't know what a good game is.

Same for Sword/Shield being one of the top sellers.