'Mattel is always trying to kill me' – Creator of Skyrim's original Thomas the Tank Engine mod puts Thomas in Morrowind, ignoring 'legal threats'

The creators of the original Thomas the Tank Engine mod for Skyrim are now placing Thomas in Morrowind, apparently ignoring legal pressure from Mattel.

Really useful climberis a recently released mod from Bethesda for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind that replaces cliff racers (the flying creatures found in Vvardenfell) with Thomas the Tank Engine. It's the work of modding superstar Trainwiz, who created the infamous Thomas the Tank Engine mod for The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim in 2013, which spawned a meme: continues to this day.

Recent comments from Trainwiz on Nexus Mods and social media indicate that Mattel, the owner of Thomas the Tank Engine, has applied legal pressure, but Trainwiz has converted Thomas into Morrowind anyway.

“I made a mod that replaces the Cliffracers with Thomas the Tank Engine,” writes Trainwiz on the Nexus Mods page for “Really Useful Cliffracers.” “There’s no lesson I can learn when it comes to business because I fundamentally don’t see toy company CEOs or media CEOs as human beings.”

Trainwiz continued:

“Between working hard and dying from various accidental injuries, I sometimes feel like I need to milk a particular joke until its inevitable demise. No matter how many legal threats, physical threats, black vans with Mattel logos or severed Barbie heads mailed to me, I do it.

“It's because I have a problem with authority, especially authority that comes from intimidation. When I was a kid, I kicked a lot of bullies.”

train wise man blue sky creature Also contains news about this issue:

Modder, game developer. Made that horrible, horrible mod that replaced the dragon with Thomas the Tank Engine. He wielded the god-killing javelin with his own hands. Mattel is always trying to kill me.

But why release a cliff racer now that actually works? Also on the Nexus Mods page, Trainwiz explains: “I actually made it a few years ago and never released it, but then I realized I didn't particularly care anymore.”

Reading between the lines, Trainwiz says Mattel's lawyers have been raising objections to his Thomas the Tank engine mods for years, though we don't know if it was more recently or in what form. What's clear is that Bethesda has given Trainwiz the green light. it even An interview with him was published in 2016showcasing the sports-related mods he creates for developer games.

Trainwiz was later interviewed Face2019. “To be honest, the whole thing was spontaneous,” he said of the creation of his original Skyrim mod. ​“A friend of mine gave me some Thomas models that he ripped out of a crappy iPhone game and asked me what I could do with them, so I spent half an hour replacing the dragons. I’d read the books as a kid but hadn’t really thought about the whole thing in years. It was just ‘What was the funniest thing to do at the time? “.

In that interview, he also discussed possible legal action as a result of his work. ​“I was in a lot of trouble,” he revealed. “Mattel almost wants me to die at this point – which is why you can't find mods for Fallout 4 on any normal website.”

In the same interview, The Face said Mattel “released its lawyers” after Trainwiz's Skyrim mod circulated on YouTube. ​“This was an intermediary law firm based in Macedonia saying how I was diluting Thomas’s brand by showing his explosion (which had nothing to do with his violent killings),” Trainwiz said. “They issued takedown notices on these videos. The first time it was taken down. The second time YouTube told them it was protected by parody laws and I had no prompt. So that's good.”

For now, Trainwiz's Thomas the Tank Engine mods for Skyrim and Morrowind remain online, and the scourge of one of gaming's most famous memes continues.

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Wesley is IGN News Director. Find him on Twitter: @wyp100. You can contact Wesley at [email protected] or privately at [email protected].