No. Assuming they rebuilt the game in a publicly available game engine, they could release whatever they did to that, but the characters are trademarked, and the game level design and any audio they’d have used would be copyrighted. The fact that you didn’t ask for money isn’t a defense that would stand up in court.
There is a potential way around this that has often been used by other projects. You make the original game files a requirement for it to work and you don’t distribute any files that include trademarked material directly and instead it uses the original files and modifies/extends them as needed. This has been used for a large number of other projects including things like the Ocarina of Time decompilation project.
It would still qualify as a mod if it required the original game, I’m pretty sure it would be fine to release that way, but it’s probably not worth the risk of legal bullshit.
No. Assuming they rebuilt the game in a publicly available game engine, they could release whatever they did to that, but the characters are trademarked, and the game level design and any audio they’d have used would be copyrighted. The fact that you didn’t ask for money isn’t a defense that would stand up in court.
There is a potential way around this that has often been used by other projects. You make the original game files a requirement for it to work and you don’t distribute any files that include trademarked material directly and instead it uses the original files and modifies/extends them as needed. This has been used for a large number of other projects including things like the Ocarina of Time decompilation project.
It’s a remake that uses new, higher quality assets though, so isn’t an option in this case.
It would still qualify as a mod if it required the original game, I’m pretty sure it would be fine to release that way, but it’s probably not worth the risk of legal bullshit.