Games That Used to be My Little Pony Fangames

Online fan-bases for things usually make a whole ton of art, but never really any fan-games. There's two exceptions to this that I've seen: Touhou fans, and My Little Pony fans, both of which seemed to dominate part of the internet circa around a decade ago before seemingly receding quietly into their own corners.

But whereas Touhou has an insanely open license which, to hear it told, effectively gives fans full permission to make whatever, Hasbro loves sending C&D orders. The end result is that the few large-scale MLP fan-games to exist have lived on by removing as much in-game evidence to their origins as possible.

Note: There are a couple examples of games that not only still exist, but are fairly obviously tied to MLP, such as Pony Town and Legends of Equestria, however both games seemingly avoid any directly copyrighted material.

List items

• 

  1. Them's Fightin' Herds

  The most obvious and famous example, Them's Fightin' Herds originally began as the awfully-named Marevel Vs. Clopcom in mid-2011, eventually becoming Fighting is Magic, featuring the show's primary cast (and Trixie.) By that stage, the game had some decent buzz around it, even almost making it to EVO 2013. However, it received a C&D in February 2013, and most of the game's downloads were scrubbed.

  A request to be allowed to use the IP was predictably denied. However, in a pretty amazing turn of events, show-runner Lauren Faust joined the game's development team to design them a slate of new characters. The game also received some attention from Lab Zero, and the situation brought the project a fair bit of attention all around, ironically allowing it to become way larger than it had been before.

• 

  2. Super Lesbian Animal RPG

  Originally Super Lesbian Horse RPG - Preemptive Game of the Year Edition - (or SLHRPG), this game was an RPGMaker title featuring Fluttershy, Rainbow Dash, and co. as the pair struggled to go on a date. It released Christmas 2013, however multiple copyright claims later, downloads of the original game are *mostly* all gone. However, the game's (pretty good) soundtrack can still be found on Bandcamp to this day.

  That said, since 2015, SLHRPG has been receiving a pretty thorough remake, featuring an original cast, a vastly expanded... everything, and a rebranding since it's no longer about gay horses. I'm interested to see how the remake turns out, since the original has some fun goofy writing, but felt at times held-back by using preexisting characters and a fairly loose scope.

• 

  3. Battle Gem Ponies

  Aside from the game's equine designs featuring the tell-tale rounded features and general shape of Faust's take on ponies, older screenshots of Battle Gem Ponies show various characters from and similar to MLP characters. This includes direct characters like Celestia, and references to fan-made characters like Sweetie Bot and Fluffle Puff, all of which were eventually removed to avoid coming across as little more than an MLP fan-game.

• 

  4. Sulphur Nimbus: Hel's Elixir

  I had never heard of this one until stumbling across it and seeing the (fairly obviously MLP inspired) animal designs. Turns out my hunch was right, tech demos and plot summaries from 2013 show that the game was originally supposed to be about Rainbow Dash, although all of it was voluntarily removed when the game went to Kickstarter, to avoid legal issues.