I'd understand if this was 2013 Nintendo. But we've seen lackluster and broken releases from the once mighty Nintendo. Including, ironically, a lackluster and inconsistent Link's Awakening remake, that ran at its best on an emulator.
We are once again seeing fans beating out the companies that created the games, at their own game.
Although I can't say I know nintendo's public position on this. I always find it funny whenever a corpo argues in favor of the "free market" as a reason not to do anything to improve the lives of everyone, but as soon as someone touches their precious decaying corpse of an intellectual property suddenly it's "infringing on my intellectual property and degrading the value of my assets.".
Piracy isn't relevant here. This is a fan-created work of art, and free for anyone who wants to play it. Nothing was "stolen", and Nintendo is, as always, being a bunch of corpo fucktards.
I don't know much about Link's Awakening DX HD. But I'm curious about three things:
Did Link's Awakening DX HD have a price on itch.io or was it a free or pay-what-you-want thing?
Did they distribute assets from Link's Awakening along with the engine, or was it just the engine with a tool to extract the assets from a Link's Awakening ROM?
Too bad it was never open sourced. Seems like someone could have stripped out the assets, made a tool to extract assets from the ROM, and the result wouldn't infringe.
Maybe the author would be willing to open source the engine with no assets now. We can hope, I guess.
Just seems like it wouldn't have taken that much more work to make it less likely to be taken down by threats from Nintendo.
Edit: I wrote this response before I saw @nanoUFO's response about it having been open source.
Edit2: I just realized the GitHub repo doesn't indicate what license that code is under. So, not FOSS and it's unclear what's legal to do with that code.