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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/postal-history on 2025-01-04 12:34:12+00:00.

Cookie’s Bustle: Mysterious Bombo World is a 1999 Japanese game released for Windows and Mac by an eight-person indie studio. It was their only game and they folded in 2002. The game is very finicky and requires (emulation of) a period Japanese Windows install or specific versions of Mac OS Classic. The gameplay is also fairly mundane. What is not mundane at all is the bizarre imagery, with the titular Cookie, depicted as a teddy bear, wandering through a dreamscape of helicopter crashes, UFOs, hamburgers and shape-changing entities. From an article about the game’s disappearance:

We control Cookie Blair, a five-year-old girl from New Jersey who believes she is a bear. The girl lives in Bombo World, a fictional island where – a hundred years prior – aliens have crash-landed and established their own place to live in, Derocity. Cookie wants to compete in the regional Olympics, but after travelling to Bombo City, she discovers that the whole place is in a state of unrest and, in order to reach her grandma, she will have to develop “a pure heart”.

The intended audience of the game was both children and Westerners, but it was developed with a very odd idea of what children and Westerners want, seemingly naive and unfamiliar with the common visual tropes of gaming. Basically any single clip of Cookie’s Bustle will amaze you with the raw imagination of its creator. This is truly video games as art. However, I can’t link any clips here (although there are a few surviving online) because someone calling themselves the creator of the game began relentlessly trolling the obscure video game fandom in 2023, issuing takedown notices to 5-second absurdist clips posted by ClassicsOfGame, a Twitch VOD on the RetroPals channel, and all the ROMs on the Internet Archive and elsewhere of this very clear abandonware. From the American side, this is a sociopathic attack on the fandom, as video game historian SynaMax stated in February 2023 when the takedowns began:

This Cookie’s Bustle situation is an abuse of copyright as well as actively destroying both video game history and the efforts of preservationists.

I am not a gamer. I just love the aesthetic of old games and the surprising amount of artistry and freedom that went into even the most obscure retro games. But I have dealt with Japanese culture in my day job, and I’m sorry to say that this is bringing me to disagree with SynaMax’s judgment. This is not a straightforward case of a copyright troll — it’s more like a Gothic horror.

The Leaking of Cookie’s Bustle

Cookie’s Bustle first came to the attention of the obscure video game community when a group of 70 previously unknown and ultra-obscure Japanese games was leaked to the Internet Archive. The source of this leak is known but bizarre. They were initially posted to a private ROM collector’s forum in early 2018, in a folder marked “DO NOT UPLOAD”. Vice writes:

Members of the private forum hesitated to upload [the DO NOT UPLOAD folder to archive sites] in the fear that the private collector would take down the folder and leave the collection out of reach once again. This hesitation demonstrates the often tense relationship between game preservationists and private collectors. According to a screenshot uploaded by [the leaker], the private collector threatened to pull the entire folder of content from the directory and stop uploading games altogether if anyone leaked [it].

This collector mockingly posted a link to the Lost Media Wiki, bragging that he had one of their games and “I don’t get why some people obsess over this game just because hardcore 101 made a comment about it.” This apparently pissed off another forum user so much that he uploaded the entire folder to Mega and posted a YouTube video ranting about the collector’s attitude. This was seen as a very bad thing. According to Vice, the “preservationists” had been hesitant to repost the folder because it would harm personal relationships not just with that especially arrogant collector but with other users of the secret forum going forward. Even the preservationist who Vice quotes took down his own blog post about the leak, in which he lamented that a “bridge [was] very publicly burned”.

The initial collector has come forward on the Cookie’s Bustle Discord and announced that he is not responsible for the DMCA claims. So, why am I telling you this? Eh, I’ll get to that later.

The Claiming of Cookie’s Bustle

After the 2018 leak, some people loved this game so much that they attempted to contact the creator, Keisuke Harigai. Harigai is a relatively uncommon name in Japan, so people have reached out to apparent relatives as well. To this day no one has reported successfully contacting him. The closest anyone came was in summer 2021 when someone heard from a friend of a friend that the creator was supposedly uninterested.

Starting in July 2021, three bizarre IP registrations were filed. First, an unknown company in the Principality of Andorra filed copyright registrations for the Cookie’s Bustle logo. This company is so obscure, based in a tax haven which keeps company info secret, that it was thought to be a fake company when the takedowns began; only a reporter in 2024 was able to confirm that they are a genuine member of the UK video game copyright association Ukie. The Andorran company has not responded to requests for comment by the reporter, Ukie, or anyone else.

Second, INTEROCO Copyright Office UG, a multinational copyright registration service, filed a registration for the New Jerseyite protagonist Cookie Blair using an actual render of the character. The render has incorrect shading, so it was seemingly recompiled from source code, which none of the fans had yet accomplished at that point. This copyright was claimed by a lawyer named Brandon White. No one has been able to reach this Mr. White. This lawyer also filed an extensive trademark registration in the US in 2022, which has undergone multiple revisions and extensions through October 2024.

Finally, a trademark was filed in the UK attributed to the elusive Keisuke Harigai himself. So, while the DMCA takedowns of little channels like ClassicsOfGame were at first thought to be a troll or a collector trying to perversely drive up the price, this is clearly not the case: real lawyers are involved and if Harigai is being impersonated, it’s pretty serious impersonation. As mentioned, the conceited collector who had originally obtained the ROM also personally joined Discord to say it wasn’t him either.

(belated edit) The INTEROCO registration included an encrypted RAR file with a description of the game and screenshots. The RAR password was discovered to be the lawyer’s name, and the content within was an extensive English-language description of gameplay and mechanics, and many screenshots arranged in a world map with translations of the in-game dialogue, as if an English-language publisher had been seriously working on a rerelease at one point. The description contains such deadpan lines as

For this seemingly unfortunate reason, [Cookie] is unable to ride the bus. Nevertheless, this was a blessing in disguise as the bus is attacked by terrorists, and blown up right in front of Cookie.

Another document gives a planned release date of 2022. After this one final leak, INTEROCO made the files private and Discord sent warnings to users who had shared files from the RAR.

Okay, so this drama seems to be actually related to the developers. At least, Mr. White has access to internal dev files, the sort which are generally not shown at mere business meetings, and Harigai is apparently personally involved in the UK filing. But the extent of the copyright takedowns is unlike anything else I’ve ever heard of (and I am a longtime fan of DMCA drama). Fan art has been claimed, which is unheard of for an indie game. A rare ROM site which even the Nintendo lawyers don’t know about was forced to block Cookie’s Bustle. Vinesauce got hit with a copyright strike on YouTube for playing it. The Vinesauce subreddit got takedowns issued when they quietly posted a ROM. The Cookie’s Bustle Discord server has had so much material taken down, including uploads to the server itself, that their welcome message warns users that a spy for the claimants is active in the server at all times.

The Secret of Cookie’s Bustle

When the takedowns began in August 2022, a website emerged to respond to theories and rumors about who was responsible. To summarize:

1. Is a rerelease planned? Seemingly there was at one point, but it’s now been 2.5 years with no news at all, not even an explanation for the takedowns.
2. Is the American lawyer acting on his own authority? If the contract were broken, how would he have authority to issue takedowns? And Harigai owns the UK filing …

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