“I had only just heard about the show due to internet mumblings,” said artist and animator Jay Wright. A public recruitment effort ensued, resulting in formal announcement of My Little Pony: Fighting Is Magic, a play on the show’s “Friendship Is Magic” subtitle, on a My Little Pony image board. The response to the images was explosive, and suggested people were legitimately interested in seeing Anuka’s vision through. I look back at the horrible, tutti-frutti combo of a GUI I made for that and wonder who spiked my punch." “I invested a total of 15 minutes and 16 seconds between getting the idea of making them from a comment on Ponibooru to the actual first execution. "I never intended those screenshots to be taken seriously,” said Anukan in an interview with GameSpot from 2013. That almost never happens because people naturally want to share what they’ve made. A cease and desist might still come, but it’s too late the genie is fully out of the bottle. There’s an argument that fan projects worried about legal problems should be made entirely in secret, only to reveal themselves once the work is completed and can be shared with the world. Just do a Google search for "video game cease and desist." Whatever the intentions of fans might be, no matter how cool the project looks, despite how many hours they’ve poured into making it, they don’t own the properties they’re riffing on. Eventually, it’s likely to get a scary-sounding letter from a lawyer-aka a cease and desist-from the rights holder, and the project will be forced to shut down. Whenever a fan project gets announced, especially one that garners real attention, a countdown begins. “There's a giant crater in my mind involving the timeline of events around the C&D because it was pretty devastating,” said combat designer Omari Smith to me recently. But on February 8, 2013, Fighting Is Magic was effectively cancelled, and despite the team’s attempts to find a resolution with Hasbro, the company wasn’t interested. It was long enough for fans to wonder if the lawyers at Hasbro were prepared to turn a blind eye. The fan-driven fighting game building on Hasbro’s kid-centric property, whose hardcore, adult (largely) male fans are affectionately called bronies, began development in the summer of 2011, and for the next year and a half, seemed to face no legal opposition. This new generation has clearly taken quite a few leaps backward since then.Them’s Fightin’ Herds’ arrival on Steam late last month is the surprising conclusion of a daunting seven-year journey of fandom. With the founding of Twilight's school, she sought to bring friendship to all sentient races, not just ponies. The only real problems the old generation had with other species were those who weren't ponies, such as Changelings, Yaks, and Hippogriffs. Canterlot was primarily a unicorn city, but every pony could walk around freely. For example, Cloudsdale really would have let other kinds around, but no pony but a pegasus could walk on clouds without magic. She eventually gets her hard proof in the form of old advertisements hidden away in Zephyr Heights that it was definitely true, and then she went on to bring all of the species togetherīack in Friendship is Magic, there was some separation between ponykind but they weren't nearly as aggressive about it. Sunny and her father strongly believed that all ponykind used to be friends and were willing to sacrifice the chance at a normal life in order to prove it. The fact that ponies are divided by species and no longer friends is the main premise of the whole New Generation movie.