Nintendo has been dragged back into the news since Pocketpair unleashed Palworld on the world. For those unaware of what the correlation between the two is, it’s due to the fact that plenty of assets in Palworld look like they’ve been taken straight out of Pokémon, and apparently, the IP owners have taken notice of everything that’s been going on.
With a potential copyright infringement lawsuit waiting to happen, it feels like the perfect time to revisit one of Nintendo’s most infamous cases from the past.
Meet Gary Bowser, Someone Who Tried Messing With Nintendo and Is Still Paying the Price for It
If one ever gets the thought of hacking into any Nintendo systems, they should rethink their whole life since the company is notoriously known for lawsuits. What makes the tale of Gary Bowser so interesting is that he shares his surname with the current president of Nintendo of America, Doug Bowser. Anyone familiar with games knows the iconic big bad of the company’s signature franchise, Bowser, who keeps on kidnapping Peach in the Mario series.
Putting the coincidence of the Bowsers aside, Gary has to pay Nintendo $14 million for one of the Internet’s most common crimes: piracy. Bowser was basically involved in some shady activities, which included the use of piracy software, and ever since the company found out, he got charged and was sent to prison. That is not all, because even after serving jail time, the hacker is still legally obliged to pay a lot of money to Nintendo as a huge fine.
Gary recently completed his time in prison and finally got out, only to realize that he is in a much more dire situation than he had originally thought. During an interview with The Guardian almost a year after his release, the hacker claimed that he does not even have enough money to comfortably pay his rent because of the massive fine that he still owes Nintendo.
Knowing that he has no other option other than accepting his fate and going with the flow, Bowser just hopelessly said that the situation “could be worse.”
The Tale of Gary Bowser vs. Nintendo Should Serve as a Warning
According to Gary Bowser himself, his “sentence was like a message to other people” who ever even think of crossing Nintendo because the company simply does not hold back with its legal proceedings. The 54-year-old hacker served a total of 14 months in prison, which is not too bad considering how his actual sentence was around 40 months long.
He was released just last year in April because of good behavior, but things are not exactly rainbows and butterflies out in the real world for him.
Bowser currently has to pay around $14.5 million to Nintendo, and that hefty amount has truly made it difficult for him to survive, especially when the bills from his weekly physical therapy sessions get added to it. It is also not really easy for convicted felons to get jobs, so Gary has to come up with a way to pay the company back, which seems to be yet another sentence for life.
The hacker collaborated with a group called Team Xecuter more than a decade ago, and together, they tried to find ways to pirate Nintendo games by illegally acquiring and modifying them.
Gary’s main role in the operation was to update the group’s websites, through which it used to sell dongles containing software to bypass Nintendo’s anti-piracy systems. According to Bowser, he was not paid more than “a few hundred dollars a month” for this since he was only “a middleman in between the people doing the development work, and the people actually owning the mod chips, playing the games.”
Unfortunately, the hacker started to get “more involved” and basically just threw his life away at the company’s mercy.
As Bowser tries to figure his life out, fans are looking forward to the next Nintendo Direct. Are you team Gary or team Nintendo? Let us know in the comments!
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