This week, the Video Game History Foundation announced a very peculiar, very particular victory. Cookie’s Bustle, an extremely rare and surreal ‘90s Japanese PC game, has been liberated. If you have never heard of Cookie’s Bustle, there’s a good reason. For years someone has committed themselves to erasing every shred of Bustle’s presence online through copyright claims, despite having no ownership over the game.
Since 2022, an individual known as Brandon White, under the company Graceware, has unleashed swarms of copyright claims at any online material relating to the game Cookie’s Bustle. Many first took notice when these claims resulted in the disappearance of several posts from the cult ephemerist YouTuber ClassicsOfGame, leaving pockmarks in their elegant, numbered catalogue. The strikes extended well beyond YouTube, it turned out, with DMCA claims circulating against Twitch streams, fan art, ROM sites and even Discord posts. Whoever Brandon White is, they seemed less like someone protecting intellectual property and more like someone trying to erase it from existence.
This strange behavior came to the Video Game History Foundation’s own door. Though rare, a physical copy of the game was donated to the Foundation. The page they made to display this treasured acquisition? That got hit with a copyright strike too, piercing the web host for their archive’s web portal.
“Although Graceware’s actions against us were incredibly disruptive, we saw this as an opportunity to get to the bottom of what was happening,” writes Phil Salvador, the VGHF’s library director.
The lengthy post goes on to explain how the VGHF went on the offensive, uncovering the network of non-scrupulous firms and copyright services that White was using to launch this campaign. White had put up a smokescreen of sorts to use resources from the Association for UK Interactive Entertainment (Ukie), despite having no evidence of ownership of Cookie’s Bustle and even misspelling his own company as Gracewear in the Ukie membership.
Even if White was using automated copyright services like Web Capio to attack Bustle, the VGHF knew a confrontation with Ukie would cut him off at the pass. When the archive and entry for Cookie’s Bustle reemerged, Ukie was unable to prompt the VGHF’s host from dropping them a second time, so Ukie’s Mumith Ali reached out to the Foundation directly. It was an opportunity to call White’s bluff, with the Foundation telling Ali to reach out to Graceware to provide proof they had any claim to the original game’s creation. They could not.
The VGHF’s closing of this chapter has solved a lot of “how”s but not a lot of “why”s. The creator of Cookie’s Bustle is still unknown, making it orphaned (though not public domain). We know enough about Brandon White to say they are not the creator of Cookie’s Bustle, but we’re still left baffled as to why anyone would devote so much energy into its erasure.
For now, Cookie is free. YouTube account ClassicsOfGame triumphantly reposted the missing videos. Cookie can be shown, streamed, and appreciated. Cookie is free to dance. Dance and be happy, Cookie.
