The Great Giana Sisters: The Clone That Got Pulled

The Great Giana Sisters exists because Rainbow Arts looked at Super Mario Bros. on the Famicom and decided that Europe’s 8-bit and 16-bit owners, who mostly couldn’t buy a Nintendo console at the time, deserved a version of their own. That’s the generous reading of what happened in 1987, and it’s also, almost word for word, the argument Nintendo’s lawyers didn’t accept. The game was pulled from sale within weeks of release, and its short shelf life is now as much a part of its story as anything you can do in it.

A structure copied closely enough to be the whole story

Set the two games side by side and the debt is immediate. Giana Sisters puts its player-controlled sister running and jumping left to right through side-scrolling stages, breaking overhead blocks for power-ups, stomping enemies from above, collecting currency, riding the occasional platform gimmick, and reaching a flagpole-adjacent stage-end marker. Power-ups transform Giana’s appearance and abilities in a manner that maps closely onto Mario’s mushroom-and-fire-flower progression. None of this is a subtle homage or a shared genre convention — Super Mario Bros. had, at the time, established a specific and fairly novel set of systems, and Giana Sisters adopted essentially that whole set rather than one or two ideas from it.

That’s worth being precise about, because “clone” gets thrown around loosely in games criticism to describe anything that shares a genre with something successful. Giana Sisters isn’t a platformer that happens to resemble Mario in the way any two shooters resemble each other. It’s a case where the specific, ownable systems of one game — the block-breaking, the power-up tiers, the stomp-to-kill loop, the stage-clear marker — were reproduced closely enough that Nintendo had a straightforwardly defensible legal argument, and the case is a useful, concrete data point in a conversation licensed games and imitation-era software often has to have in more abstract terms.

Why the closeness mattered more than usual

Games had been borrowing from each other’s mechanics since the arcade era began, and most of that borrowing never invited legal action, because a jump button or a scoring system generally isn’t the kind of thing courts treat as ownable in the way a specific character, a specific visual design, or a specific combination of systems executed in a recognisably similar way can be. What made Giana Sisters different wasn’t that it had platforming — platforming wasn’t Nintendo’s to own — it was the accumulation of specific, identifiable choices lifted in combination: block-breaking with power-ups that emerge from above, a stomp-based kill that mirrors Mario’s exact interaction model, a currency-collection loop tuned to the same rhythm, and a stage-clear structure that echoes the flagpole beat closely enough that anyone who had played Super Mario Bros. would recognise the shape immediately. Any one of those elements in isolation might have been defensible as a genre convention. Together, they read as a specific game being reproduced rather than a genre being worked within, and that combination is what gave Nintendo’s claim its teeth.

What the copy actually did well

Here’s the part that keeps Giana Sisters worth talking about instead of a footnote: the parts it didn’t copy are genuinely good on their own terms. The level design leans into a darker, dreamlike aesthetic that Mario never touched — crystalline caverns, unsettling enemy designs, a tonal register closer to a fever dream than a sunlit Mushroom Kingdom — and the movement, while clearly built on the same jump-arc principles, has its own weight and momentum rather than being a byte-for-byte recreation of Mario’s physics. Rainbow Arts’ team took real care with the visual and level design around that borrowed structure, and the result, stripped of the surface-level structural borrowing, stands up as a competent, distinctive 8-bit and 16-bit platformer rather than a hollow reskin.

That distinction — copying a system faithfully while still bringing genuine craft to the parts left open — is why Giana Sisters survives as more than a legal footnote. A pure reskin with nothing else going for it would have vanished the moment it left shelves. Giana Sisters got pulled and kept getting talked about anyway, because there was an actual game worth discussing underneath the structural theft.

Two sisters, not one plumber

One place Giana Sisters does something Mario’s original release didn’t is genuine simultaneous two-player action — a second sister, distinguished mainly by colour, can join the same stage rather than waiting through alternating single-player turns. It’s a small addition against the scale of the systems borrowed elsewhere, but it’s a real one, and it points at the part of the design that was genuinely additive rather than derivative: the game understood that a home-computer audience playing on a shared keyboard or a pair of joysticks might want to play together, in a way a console cartridge built around a single controller port didn’t need to solve in the same way. It’s a modest example of the broader pattern in this piece — the borrowed skeleton, dressed in choices that were the European team’s own.

Ports, and which one actually plays best

Giana Sisters saw releases across the Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST and other contemporary home computers, and the differences between them are more than cosmetic. The Amiga version benefits from the platform’s greater colour depth and smoother scrolling capability, giving the dreamlike level aesthetic more room to actually look dreamlike rather than merely suggestive of it. The C64 version, constrained by the machine’s more limited palette and rougher scrolling, leans harder on the tightness of the jump mechanics to carry a stage, since the atmosphere has less visual horsepower behind it. Neither version is a strictly better game than the other, but they make slightly different arguments for why the design is worth playing, and it’s worth trying more than one port if the game is new to you rather than assuming the C64 edition — often the first one people encounter — is the definitive version.

The legal action that made the story bigger than the game

Nintendo’s response was fast and effective for the era: cease-and-desist pressure led to Giana Sisters being withdrawn from sale within roughly a matter of weeks of its original release, making the physical release scarce almost immediately and turning it into one of the era’s more sought-after out-of-print titles among collectors in the decades since. That scarcity did more for the game’s reputation than a long, uneventful shelf life would have — a title that got made to disappear invites curiosity in a way a permanently available one doesn’t, and Giana Sisters' mythology is inseparable from the fact that it was, for most of its existence, hard to legally obtain.

It’s a useful case study in how intellectual property enforcement shapes the historical record as much as the market: the game’s commercial failure wasn’t a failure of quality or sales appetite, it was a legal action that cut a viable product’s life short before the market got to render its own verdict. Compare that to the great mascot platformer boom and bust, where most casualties were market failures rather than legal ones — Giana Sisters is the rarer case of a game killed by a rights holder rather than by players losing interest.

The clone conversation the case actually clarifies

The uncomfortable, useful thing about Giana Sisters is that it doesn’t resolve neatly into either “shameless theft” or “unfairly persecuted homage.” Both readings have real evidence behind them. The systems are copied closely enough that a legal claim was entirely reasonable; the execution is distinctive enough that dismissing the whole game as worthless imitation undersells what Rainbow Arts’ team actually built. Most discussions of games cloning games want a clean verdict, and Giana Sisters is a case where the honest answer sits in the friction between both facts being true simultaneously — a structural copy and a genuine piece of design craft, occupying the same cartridge.

Where it went afterward

The game found an unusual afterlife decades later, when a legally sanctioned modern sequel and remake project brought the Giana Sisters name back with the blessing of the surviving rights holders, repositioning the character as a legitimate ongoing series rather than a buried curiosity. That’s a strange, almost redemptive arc for a game whose original release was defined by getting yanked off shelves — the character outlived the lawsuit by long enough to become the founding entry in a franchise on its own terms.

An early data point in a fight that never really ended

The specific legal and commercial dynamics of Giana Sisters’ takedown look almost quaint against the scale of modern clone disputes — mobile storefronts flooded with near-identical reskins, indie developers accusing larger studios of lifting a distinctive mechanic wholesale, the constant low-grade argument over where inspiration ends and infringement begins. But the underlying tension is exactly the same one Nintendo’s 1987 legal letters were responding to: a game can borrow a genre’s conventions freely, and cross into trouble the moment it borrows a specific, identifiable combination of systems closely enough that the source is instantly recognisable rather than merely evoked. Giana Sisters is one of the clearest, earliest home-computer examples of that line actually getting tested in public, with a real commercial consequence attached, rather than just argued about in a magazine’s letters page.

Where to play it

The Great Giana Sisters is preserved and playable today on Commodore 64 and Amiga emulators, and the original’s scarcity as a physical artefact makes emulation the practical way most people encounter it now. It’s worth playing with the Mario comparison consciously in mind rather than pretending it isn’t there — the point isn’t to catch the game copying, it’s already caught; the interesting question is what it does with the space left over once the borrowed structure is accounted for.