Russ Crandall knows how to reinvent himself. At 24, he relearned how to walk and write after a stroke impacted his brain. When open-heart surgery wasn’t enough to address a rare autoimmune disease, he adopted a paleo diet — and became a New York Times bestselling cookbook author and food blogger following his seemingly miraculous recovery. Last year, he retired from a 22-year career as a US Navy translator to become a full-time YouTuber instead.

Now, he’s wondering if Nintendo will force him to change yet again.

Crandall runs Retro Game Corps, a YouTube channel with half a million subscribers that shows hundreds of ways to play classic games using modern hardware and emulation. If there’s a handheld gaming device released in the past four years, odds are Crandall has made a 20-minute video about it. He started the channel as a hobby in 2020 during the covid-19 pandemic but soon realized it could become his day job.

So, last year, he shut down his food blog — “I was kind of done telling people what to eat,” he says — and left the military with the rank of master chief petty officer.

But four years into his YouTube career, on September 28th, Crandall saw how easily his new life as a content creator could disintegrate. Walking back from his studio after pulling an all-nighter, he checked his phone to see if a just-edited video was uploading properly. It was — but another one of his videos vanished before his eyes. Days earlier, he’d published a 14-minute video about how well Nintendo Wii U games can run on Android handhelds, and now it had been wiped from YouTube.

“This can’t be happening,” he recalls saying out loud. A few minutes later, a YouTube email confirmed it wasn’t a glitch: Nintendo had issued a DMCA takedown notice, YouTube had removed his video, and his entire 500,000-subscriber channel was now at risk of permanent deletion. 

It was his second YouTube copyright strike from Nintendo, and Crandall says that’s when it truly sank in. YouTube maintains a strict “three strikes, you’re out” rule, and he realized his family’s livelihood depended on preventing strike number three. “It all sort of came crashing down in that moment,” he tells The Verge.

In a panic, he rushed back to the studio, canceled his upload, and publicly declared that Nintendo was targeting him. He would begin self-censoring all his videos to hopefully escape the Japanese company’s wrath. “I will no longer show any Nintendo games on-screen,” he told his fans and related communities on Reddit, YouTube, and social networks.

Nintendo was well within its rights to ask for a takedown, of course: Crandall had shown the company’s copyrighted content onscreen. And yet that doesn’t explain the copyright strike at all since countless Twitch streamers, YouTubers, TikTokers, and Instagrammers show Nintendo content every single day. Clearly, Nintendo was using copyright as a pretext to get these videos taken down.

Most institutions have historically taken Nintendo’s legal threats seriously. Countless fan projects, including unofficial remakes and sequels, have been voluntarily terminated by their creators after receiving cease and desist orders from Nintendo. While the technology behind video game emulators is generally considered legal, even the lead developers of the Nintendo Switch emulators Yuzu and Ryujinx folded when Nintendo came knocking on their doors.

But unlike many of those developers, Crandall isn’t some pseudonymous person who could slink back into the internet’s shadows. Nor is he someone Nintendo can readily accuse of “facilitating piracy at a colossal scale,” like Yuzu, for distributing software tools. 

Even among content creators, Crandall doesn’t seem like the kind of person Nintendo usually threatens — he’s known for advocating that people should buy Nintendo products before they use emulators and often shows off physical cartridges in his videos to drive that message home. 

“If I’m playing a Switch game on my Steam Deck, the cartridge will be there or the box will be there to indicate that I have purchased the game,” he says. While he admits he hasn’t done that 100 percent of the time, he’s been careful with Nintendo Switch games in particular. In one of the videos that YouTube removed, he flips through a wallet full of 80 genuine cartridges. He also produces guides on how to create personal backups of your own genuine classic games.

That’s why the community was so surprised when Nintendo targeted him, of all YouTubers — and it’s why Crandall might possibly take the unusual step of challenging Nintendo’s takedowns. 

Crandall says he’s been a Nintendo fan for nearly 40 years, ever since his family bought an NES for Christmas in 1985. The copyright strikes hit hard. “This is the first actual interaction I’ve had with Nintendo, and it’s crazy. I feature most of their games not because I’m trying to, like, stick it to them, but just sharing the love of those games,” he says. 

But he does have a guess as to why Nintendo targeted him. The first copyright strike landed on his video about the MIG Dumper and the MIG Flash, a pair of devices that let you turn genuine Nintendo Switch cartridges into digital files and then carry around an entire library of those ROMs in a special microSD-equipped flash cartridge for your console. I’ve watched the video, and while Crandall does explicitly take an anti-piracy stance, it’s easy to imagine these gadgets being used by bad actors, too. 

“I think the first strike was simply due to the fact that they wanted to minimize attention around the MIG Flash cartridge and dumper, and they had an opportunity,” Crandall says. That opportunity was a relatively tiny mistake: unlike, say, fellow YouTuber Taki Udon’s video on the MIG products, Retro Game Corps showed off four seconds of the title screen of Mario to prove the MIG hardware could legitimately dump and run games, potentially infringing Nintendo’s exclusive right to distribute and / or perform its audiovisual intellectual property.

Isn’t that fair use? Crandall thinks so. It seems like his uses could be brief, limited, and educational enough to satisfy the four-factor fair use test, and arguing that could genuinely get him out of YouTube purgatory. I could easily find dozens of similar examples in our journalism here at The Verge. But in order to submit what’s called a “copyright counter notification” with YouTube, which argues that he’s been inaccurately targeted and isn’t infringing on someone’s copyright, Crandall would have to open himself up to a potential Nintendo lawsuit. 

“It’s a dangerous game,” says Richard Hoeg, a business attorney who hosts the Virtual Legality podcast. “You really don’t want to get into federal court over something that even if you win, will be an expensive and time-consuming burden.”

But Crandall knows this — he seems quite read up on both the DMCA and YouTube processes — and yet he’s considered at least trying his luck. Crandall says he’s conflicted; he doesn’t want to “poke the bear.” He has his family to think about. But it’s possible Nintendo could continue to come after him, he admits, even if he lies low.

While he’s already eliminated Nintendo games from his testing suite for all future videos, he says he simply doesn’t have time to go back through the hundreds of videos he’s created that already contain Mario footage and blur or delete every last scrap. And yet, the way things stand, Nintendo could pick any of those videos to immediately designate his channel for deletion. 

Companies can freely pick and choose who they target with copyright infringement complaints and lawsuits, several legal experts tell me. Unlike with trademarks, they don’t need to actively or consistently defend their works in order to maintain their rights.

Crandall says that even YouTube initially thought that perhaps Nintendo made a mistake when targeting him. He’s part of the YouTube Partner Program, and his designated partner manager told him to sit tight while YouTube asked Nintendo if it might retract its own takedown requests. But Nintendo wouldn’t, and YouTube has now told him he’s on his own. 

As of late October, he’s waffling. He could simply wait two more months until YouTube’s 90-day copyright strikes expire because, as soon as they do, his channel will no longer be in danger of immediate termination. Nintendo’s takedown requests already succeeded in removing those videos, and he can hope Nintendo feels it’s made enough of an example out of him to do anything more. 

Or he can submit a document that shows he’s not willing to be that example, not willing to be pushed around by Nintendo — and hope it doesn’t land him in a world of legal hurt. 

It’s painful for Crandall, who has been a lifelong fan of Nintendo’s work. Even after a long day of making videos about games, he likes to relax by playing through a couple of classic Mario or Donkey Kong levels, purely to admire the artistry and design. “Since the second strike I haven’t been doing that much at all, because even just seeing the box art leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth,” he says.

Nintendo didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.