Some of my favorite games are those that have been removed from the developer’s hands. Games that have intense modding scenes tend to spark the most creativity. To me, Minecraft comes to mind. So many mods that change the way of the game and so many servers that make the game anew.

Hypixel, Mineplex, Cubecraft, and many more servers change the inherent way that the game is played. It can take a game about surviving and building and turn it into playing tag, but if you are it, you might just get blown up.

And that just scratches the surface of what servers can do. Wynncraft turns Minecraft on its head by making it into an RPG that you can play with hundreds of other players in a custom world with different graphics, music, and even different gameplay.

When the tools become available, people bend others’ creations to their ideas. If someone has an idea, they will shape what they can to make it real. The people behind all the large Minecraft servers did it, but it is not exclusive to them.

Fangames like Super Mario 63⁠—a flash game that has been around for years upon years⁠—show how fans can turn a larger piece of media into something that they think others will enjoy. This specific game turns Super Mario 64 for the N64 into a 2D platformer with incredibly fluid movement unseen in the official Nintendo games.

But that’s not the only Mario fangame. Another game turns SM64 into a first-person shooter by giving Mario a gun. That’s it. That was the creator’s vision, and people loved it.

Not every fangame is as potentially copyright infringing as those two. Portal Reloaded is a mod for the game Portal by Valve. While being fan content, it is officially supported by Valve by being put on the steam store⁠—which they own⁠—for downloading.

It takes the base game and adds more content to it–more levels with advanced puzzles in them and adds new puzzle elements that interact with the world. The most interesting change comes in the form of a new portal that lets you access a different point in time. You can bring objects from the “past” to the “future” and vice versa.

But not all fangames are as loose and different from their inspiring work. AM2R, unshortened to Another Metroid 2 Remake, is a remake of Metroid 2. It enhances the graphics and gameplay to make it more like some of the other 2D Metroid games.

There are also games like Toontown: Rewritten and Club Penguin: Rewritten which took online games that have since been shut down and makes them anew. They give new life to the games that many people loved and grew up with.

Though the legality of that is questionable at best, that tends to be the case for most fangames. How do you classify them in terms of copyright? For a game like Toontown: Corporate Clash, a game based on Toontown, could you say that it is transformative by adding new content and changing the way that the game is meant to be played? If so, is Portal Reloaded also infringing on copyright?

I don’t know. Copyright laws are brutal and hard to understand. I do know, however, that the games I mentioned are loved by the people who’ve made them and those who’ve played them. I know that as long as people have a vision, games like AM2R will keep existing.