In May 2013, YouTuber JolteonPlays uploaded a video showcasing the rough prototype for an unofficial "3D indie Pokemon" game called Pokemon: Generations. To this day, it occasionally comes up among Pokemon fans dreaming about what new games in the series might look like. Today, recent comments on that 13-year-old video have been flooded with praise for a different reason: the existence of Pokemon: Generations has been used to dismiss potentially limiting patents filed by Nintendo amidst its Palworld lawsuit.
As Automaton reports, the Japanese Patent Office (JPO) recently upheld its rejection of a Nintendo patent targeting an "in-game monster-capturing system" – the sort of system that the company's used to argue infringement by Palworld during an extended legal process that has seen developer Pocketpair quietly adjust a few of its own features and designs to be less Pokemon-like.
This does not represent a direct shutdown of Nintendo's case against Palworld, however, as this is just one patent indirectly placed in the same family. (Last year, Pocketpair comms lead said patent infringement was something nobody considered during Palworld's exhaustive legal clearance.)
The JPO cites that exact Pokemon: Generations demonstration in its rejection under "Reasons for Rejection," arguing that Nintendo's patented idea fails to demonstrate adequate "inventive step." Definitions vary between countries, but the World Intellectual Property Organization provides a useful baseline explanation: "The condition of inventive step/non-obviousness is fulfilled if the invention as a whole, compared to the prior art as a whole, would not have been obvious to a person skilled in the art."
I pulled the URL for the Pokemon: Generations video straight from the translated notice of rejection posted to the JPO's logs, and it looks like plenty of other people, including several Japanese fans, have heard the news as well. It feels like some people may be overestimating the impact of this patent rejection on Nintendo or its relevance to Palworld's case, but there's an understandable celebratory spirit in the comments among folks happy to see ideas remain unconstrained by patents.
"You saved the entire industry," one top comment reads.
"To think years later this very footage would be used by the JPO to reject a Nintendo patent claim," adds another.
"The butterfly effect in action," says a third.
An auto-translated Japanese comment adds: "The comments section is going wild, lol. But even JPO must have thought, 'Nintendo, you're crazy...'"
This goes on and on. A huge chunk, if not a majority, of the comments on the video appear to be recent. More than anything, I'm struck by how the JPO's usage of this old fan game has led to this exact discussion. I don't think JolteonPlays ever saw it coming.
