{"id":188,"date":"2026-04-06T19:51:05","date_gmt":"2026-04-06T19:51:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.starsandsand.net\/sandscript\/?p=188"},"modified":"2026-04-26T11:46:04","modified_gmt":"2026-04-26T11:46:04","slug":"nintendos-own-patents-killed-nintendos-patent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/en.starsandsand.net\/sandscript\/nintendos-own-patents-killed-nintendos-patent\/","title":{"rendered":"Nintendo’s Own Patents Killed the Nintendo Patent"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When the USPTO weaponizes your prior filings against your current claims, no legal team is expensive enough to save you.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nintendo operates one of the most aggressive IP enforcement divisions in the consumer technology industry. It litigates, files broadly, moves fast. In April 2025, it secured US Patent No. 12,403,397. A patent covering character-summoning mechanics in video games. Within months, it was pursuing parallel litigation in the Tokyo District Court against Pocketpair, the developer of Palworld. The enforcement posture was architecturally sound: file early, cover broadly, and litigate territorially.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Surprisingly, the USPTO Central Reexamination Unit rejected all 26 claims.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rejection was not because of a competing product. It was not because of Palworld. Nor was it because of any shipped game or software release that predated the filing. The USPTO dismantled US Patent No. 12,403,397 using nothing more than previously published patent applications. Applications including two filed by Nintendo itself in 2019 and 2020. Nintendo’s own prosecution history became the instrument of invalidation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not an anomaly. This is how broad software patents fail. The only question for any founder reading this is whether it will happen to you. Before or after you spend $25,000 filing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What the USPTO Actually Did to Nintendo Patent<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Understanding the mechanics of the rejection requires understanding what ex parte reexamination<\/strong> means in practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An ex parte reexamination is a USPTO procedure that reopens the examination of a granted patent based on a substantial new question of patentability. In November 2025, USPTO Director John A. Squires personally ordered one. The first Director-initiated reexamination since 2012 to proceed without a formal request from an external third party. When the Director intervenes directly, it signals that the filing raised questions significant enough to warrant elevated institutional scrutiny. Think of it as a forced audit of a deployed system after the build already passed QA. Then, in a compounding procedural failure, Nintendo missed the official deadline to respond to the initial reexamination order. This allowed the examiner to proceed without the patent holder’s input.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PHOSITA<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The examiner’s job is to determine whether the granted claims remain valid against the prior art. In patent law, prior art<\/strong> is not limited to shipped products. It includes previously published patent applications. And the standard being applied is obviousness<\/strong>. Codified under 35 U.S.C. \u00a7 103. It asks whether the claimed invention would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art<\/em> at the time of filing. In engineering terms, the question is whether your implementation represents a sufficient delta from the established baseline of what any competent developer in your field would already know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The examiner answered that question with four patents. Konami’s “Yabe” filing from 2002, covering mechanics for character deployment in a game environment. Bandai Namco’s “Shimomoto” filing from 2020. And two Nintendo filings: “Taura” from 2019 and “Motokura” from 2020, both covering related mechanics within Nintendo’s own game architecture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The examiner combined Taura, Motokura, and Yabe to neutralize 18 of the 26 claims. The remaining 8 were dispatched using Shimomoto. Every single claim in US Patent No. 12,403,397 fell to prior art. Not one survived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Combination Argument and Why It Holds<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Nintendo’s most defensible response. The argument its legal team will almost certainly pursue in its two-month response window. Combining four separate, disparate patents from three different companies spanning 18 years of filings is not the kind of synthesis that would be obvious to an ordinary software developer. This is a legitimate doctrinal position. KSR International Co. v. Teleflex Inc.<\/em> (2007) expanded the standard for obviousness. However, courts still require that the rationale for combining references be grounded in the knowledge of a person having ordinary skill in the art at the relevant time. If the combination is non-intuitive, the claim may survive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The problem for Nintendo is that the examiner did not rely on three independent external references. Two of the four references are Nintendo’s own. Taura and Motokura are Nintendo patent filings, prosecuted by Nintendo’s own legal team. Describing Nintendo’s own prior thinking about game mechanics that overlap precisely with the claimed invention in US Patent No. 12,403,397.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In prosecution terms, Nintendo has committed the equivalent of writing a detailed architectural specification for a feature in 2019. Shipping that specification into the public record. Then arguing in 2025 that no reasonable engineer would have thought to look at it. The prior art the examiner used to establish what Nintendo itself knew. In Nintendo’s own system, at Nintendo’s own development timescale, is Nintendo’s own paper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nintendo Prosecution History Estoppel<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The prosecution history estoppel<\/strong> principle is useful here \u2014 think of it as a git commit log for your claim scope. Every narrowing argument you made during prosecution, every amendment, every distinction over prior art, becomes a permanent constraint on how broadly your claims can be interpreted in litigation. But Nintendo’s problem runs deeper than estoppel. The examiner established the baseline of ordinary skill in the art using Nintendo’s own prior contributions to that baseline. Nintendo has, in effect, argued itself into a corner of its own construction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To overcome the rejection without rendering the patent useless. Nintendo’s legal team would need to amend all 26 claims. Reciting specific technical implementations narrow enough to distinguish from the four prior art references. While simultaneously retaining claim language broad enough to be enforceable against Pocketpair or any future competitor. That is not a drafting problem. That is a structural impossibility when your own prior filings already define the ceiling of what is obvious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Parallel Nintendo Litigation in Tokyo Is Not Coincidental<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The timing is relevant. Nintendo is simultaneously pursuing the Tokyo District Court lawsuit against Pocketpair. That litigation has already produced tangible results. It is forcing Pocketpair to remove the ability to summon Pals by throwing Pal Spheres in November 2024 and to patch the game’s gliding mechanics in May 2025. Nintendo has been actively advancing a legal argument in that proceeding. Software modifications and iterative game releases should not qualify as prior art. The strategy is coherent at the portfolio level. Suppressing the scope of what counts as prior art in one jurisdiction reduces the surface area of vulnerability in both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the USPTO is not bound by the Tokyo District Court’s evidentiary framework. The examiner was not applying Japanese IP law. The reexamination operated strictly within 35 U.S.C. \u00a7 103. It used patents filed and published under the US system, with prior art defined according to 35 U.S.C. \u00a7 102. Nintendo’s attempts to contain the prior art narrative in Japan have no bearing on what the Central Reexamination Unit is permitted to consider in America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is a jurisdiction architecture failure. Filing a broad patent in one territory. Suppressing its validity in a parallel proceeding. Failing to anticipate that your own global portfolio would be turned against you in a reexamination. These are not independent errors. They are symptoms of treating IP prosecution as a litigation tactic rather than as an architectural commitment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What This Means at the Claim Level<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The specific mechanics claimed in US Patent No. 12,403,397 are character-summoning interactions in a video game environment. This is the process by which a player initiates the deployment of a character entity through defined in-game mechanics. The breadth of that description is the core problem. At that level of abstraction, the claim is not describing a novel technical implementation. It is describing a category of interaction that has existed in software for decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the fundamental distinction that founders and CTOs building in adjacent spaces need to internalize. The USPTO does not grant protection over functional outcomes<\/em>. It grants protection over specific implementations<\/em> of those outcomes. The delta between those two concepts is the delta between a defensible claim schema and an invalidated one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A claim that reads “a system for summoning a character in response to a player input” is a functional description. It tells you what happens. A defensible claim tells you exactly how<\/em> it happens \u2014 the specific data structures, the computational sequences, the state machine transitions, the memory allocation logic \u2014 at a level of technical specificity that generates enough surface area to distinguish from every prior art reference that describes the same functional outcome through different technical means.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If your claims read like product documentation, they will fail. If they read like a network topology specification with all edge cases explicitly constrained, they have a structural chance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Two Strategic Exits<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The Nintendo case closes two failure modes simultaneously, and opens two distinct paths forward depending on where you are in your architecture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

If you are pre-Series A, the reexamination confirms what conservative prosecution strategy has always indicated. The only defensible filing is a narrow one. Not narrow in commercial scope \u2014 narrow in claim architecture. File on the exact pipeline that solves the specific technical problem your implementation solves. Not the problem class. Not the vertical. The specific computation, the specific method, the specific transformation from input state to output state. Every claim that cannot be tied to a concrete implementation step is a claim that will be read against the prior art baseline and likely found obvious. The exposure is not worth the filing cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you are a funded scale-up building in a vertical where incumbent players are actively constructing broad portfolios, the Nintendo reexamination is an intelligence asset. The examiner’s methodology is public. The four prior art references used to dismantle 26 claims are on the record. The category of patents that survived USPTO scrutiny \u2014 and the category that did not \u2014 is now precisely documented. Your legal team’s job is to systematically identify the gaps in incumbent portfolios that prior art does not cover. Then publish targeted defensive prior art into those gaps before incumbents can file claims that would otherwise constrain your architecture. A well-placed defensive publication costs a fraction of an IPR proceeding. A preemptive filing costs a fraction of both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In neither case does broad functional claiming work. Nintendo spent the institutional resources of one of the world’s largest IP enforcement operations on a patent that did not survive its own prior art. The lesson is not about Nintendo. It is about the architecture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
The USPTO's full non-final rejection of US Patent No. 12,403,397 is publicly accessible through the Patent Center. The four prior art references \u2014 Yabe, Shimomoto, Taura, and Motokura \u2014 are each independently available in the USPTO database. The examiner's combination logic is in the record. Read it before your next claims draft.<\/em><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
\u2014 Stars and Sand US Patent Strategies for the World<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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