Nintendo Apologizes for Insults

Nintendo's Laurent Fischer, marketing director for Nintendo Europe, has apologized for says that only "geeks and otaku" would want a hard drive for their Wii. Fischer says the remarks were not meant to be offensive. Who uses the word otaku anyway?

I also don't see why the console companies get so mad when gamers want bigger storage space. Yes, the Nintendo Wii could use a real hard drive instead of just 512 MB memory or memory cards. And remember when Microsoft would get so mad when people were asking for a hard drive bigger than 20 GB?

Epic's VP Apologizes

I would like to think that I single handedly got the VP of Epic, Mark Rein, to apologize for the I-Hate-Freedom department at Epic. I shot an e-mail to Mark telling him that I thought it was totally stupid that his lawyers sent the letter to Emilio Lopez. Mark actually replied with the message that he sent out to the fan sites. Check it out.

Ugh. Our lawyers are trying to do their job and protect our trademarks but I guess they didn't realize this wasn't a commercial project and they fired off a standard form letter. It is unfortunate when this happens but the problem with trademarks is you HAVE to protect them and Emilio's work looks so amazingly professional, right down to a cool package!, that they probably failed to notice this was a one-off gift for non-commercial use. What we need to do is come up with some sort of permission letter for things like these so that we're properly protecting our future commercial rights but not stopping people from doing cool fan art like this.

On behalf of Epic I apologize to Emilio and anyone who was offended by this.


Mark Rein
Epic Games, Inc.

Way to go Mark. *Gives Mark a soft punch to the arm*