MODESTO, Calif. — A modder who replaced the native creatures of breakout hit Palworld with Pokémon was instructed not to continue his work by a man who bore a suspicious resemblance to one of Nintendo’s lawyers, sources confirm.
“This guy’s knocking at my door yelling about a cease and desist letter, and I’m thinking he looks a little familiar,” said Mike Barton, who goes by the handle CrispySocks online. “Suddenly it hits me: this dude is just a palette-swapped Joe Levine. Joe’s an attorney at Nintendo who’s served me a bunch of times. He got me for my Metroid fan game, my Zelda demake, and the Kirby slash fic I was trying to sell on the Kindle store. I’m telling you, if I didn’t know any better, I would have thought it was him. It’s definitely enough to fool your average copyright violator.”
Some of Barton’s followers speculated that the new lawyer may have been generated by artificial intelligence.
“Back in my day, if you wanted to rip off a legal professional, you had to do it manually,” said user BuffSmite91 on X (formerly Twitter). “You had to painstakingly drop out of law school, or watch a bunch of YouTube videos, or at least look stuff up on Wikipedia. I’m not saying that it’s right to benefit so directly from the fruits of others’ labor, but it was kind of tradition. ‘Faux-torney’ was basically its own genre, and at least they put some effort into it. Now these hacks can do it with the push of a button.”
Legal experts were quick to push back on Barton’s claims.
“Okay, I’m getting really sick of seeing this stuff from laymen,” said attorney Jerry Waller, whose social media profile simply read, “#LawTwitter,” and noted that he was a graduate of Yale. “It’s just so tiring to log on and see these guys claiming that all lawyers are the same. We’re individual human beings. For instance, I do a livestream where I play Minecraft while talking about recent legal news. My friend Barry does a stream where he builds LEGO models while talking about recent legal news. We couldn’t be any more different. It’s bullshit.”
When asked about the issue, Nintendo stated that they refuse to comment on rumors or speculation.
