The creator of the original Thomas the Tank Engine mod for Skyrim has now put Thomas in Morrowind, apparently against legal pressure from Mattel.
Really useful climbersA recently released mod for Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind replaces the Rock Racers (flying creatures native to Vvardenfell) with Thomas the Tank Engine. It's the work of modding superstar Trainwiz, who created the infamous Thomas the Tank Engine mod for Skyrim in 2013, which spawned a meme that endures to this day.
Recent comments from Trainwiz both on Nexus Mods and social media suggest that Thomas the Tank Engine owner Mattel applied legal pressure, but Trainwiz modded Thomas into Morrowind anyway.
“I made a mod that replaces cliff racers with Thomas the Tank Engine,” Trainwiz wrote on the Nexus Mods page for Really Useful Cliffracers. “I am unable to learn lessons when it comes to corporations because I fundamentally do not consider toy company executives or media executives to be human.”
Trainvis continued:
“Between working on a game and dying from various accidental injuries, I sometimes feel like I need to milk a particular joke to its inevitable end. I will do this no matter how many legal threats, actual threats, black vans with a Mattel logo, or severed Barbie heads are sent to me in the mail.
“It's because I have a problem with power, especially power gained through bullying. I kicked a lot of bullies in the nuts as a kid.”
Trainvis Biography BlueSky also contains a post on this issue:
Modder, game developer. I made this terrible, terrible mod that replaced the dragons with Thomas the Tank Engine. Personally owned the spear that killed the god. Mattel is constantly trying to kill me.
But why release Really Useful Cliffracers now? Also on their Nexus Mods page, Trainwiz explained: “I actually made this years ago but never released it, but then I realized I don't care anymore.”
Reading between the lines, Trainwise says Mattel's lawyers have been arguing with his Thomas the Tank Engine mods for years, although we don't know when or in what form. One thing is clear: Bethesda has given Trainwiz its seal of approval. It's even published an interview with him back in 2016shedding light on the movement mods he created for the developer's games.
Trainwiz later gave an interview Facein 2019. “To be honest, it was all spontaneous,” he said of creating his original Skyrim mod. “My friend gave me some Thomas models he ripped out of a crappy iPhone game and asked what I could do with them, so I spent half an hour replacing the dragons. I read the books as a child, but haven't really thought about all this stuff for years. It was just, “What would be the funniest thing at the time?”
In this interview, he also addressed possible lawsuits as a result of his work. “I was in so much trouble,” he admitted. “At this point, Mattel really wants me to die – which is why the Fallout 4 mod can't be found on any normal website.”
In the same interview, The Face reported that Mattel had “released its lawyers” after Trainwiz's Skyrim mod went viral on YouTube. “It was some intermediary law firm from Macedonia that was talking about how I belittled Thomas’s reputation by showing him blowing up (nothing about him brutally killing people),” Trainwis said. “They issued takedown notices for the video. The first time they took it down. The second time YouTube told them it was covered by the parody law, without any prompting from me. So that was nice.”
For now, Trainwiz's Thomas the Tank Engine mod for Skyrim and now Morrowind remains online, and the scourge of one of gaming's most famous memes continues.
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Wesley is IGN's News Director. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can contact Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
