The creator of the original Thomas the Tank Engine mod for Skyrim has now put Thomas in Morrowind, apparently in defiance of legal pressure from Mattel.
Really Useful Cliffracers, a recently released mod for Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, replaces cliff racers (flying creatures found in Vvardenfell) with Thomas the Tank Engine. It’s the work of modding superstar Trainwiz, who created the infamous 2013 Thomas the Tank Engine mod for Skyrim that 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 has applied legal pressure, but Trainwiz has modded Thomas into Morrowind anyway.
“I made a mod that replaces cliffracers with Thomas the Tank Engine,” Trainwiz wrote on the Nexus Mods page for Really Useful Cliffracers. “I am incapable of learning lessons whenever it involves corporations, because I fundamentally do not view toy company CEOs or media CEOs as people.”
Trainwiz continued:
“In between working on my game and dying of various accidental injuries, I sometimes feel like I need to milk a particular joke until its inevitable demise. I will do this no matter how many legal threats, actual threats, black vans with the Mattel logo on them, or severed Barbie heads are mailed to me.
“This is because I have issues with authority, particularly authority derived from intimidation. I kicked a lot of bullies in the nuts when I was a kid.”
Trainwiz’s BlueSky bio also contains a message on this issue:
Modder, game developer. Made that horrible, horrible mod that replaces dragons with Thomas the Tank Engine. Personally wielded the javelin that killed god. Mattel is constantly out to kill me.
But why release Really Useful Cliffracers now? Also from its Nexus Mods page, Trainwiz explained: “I actually made this years ago but never released it, but then I realized that I don’t particularly care anymore.”
Reading between the lines, Trainwiz is saying Mattel’s lawyers have taken issue with his Thomas the Tank Engine mods over the years, although we don’t know how recently and in what form. What is clear is that Bethesda has given Trainwiz its seal of approval. It even published an interview with him back in 2016, shining a light on the locomotion-related mods he had created for the developer’s games.
Trainwiz was later interviewed by The Face, in 2019. “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 he had ripped from a crappy iPhone game and asked me what I could do with them, so I spent half an hour replacing dragons. I read the books as a kid, but hadn’t really even thought about the whole thing in years. It was just ’what would be the funniest thing at the time?’.”
In that interview, he also touched on potential legal action as a result of his work. “I got in so much trouble,” he revealed. “Mattel pretty much want me dead at this point — it’s the reason why the Fallout 4 mod can’t be found on any normal website.”
In the same interview, The Face said Mattel had “unleashed its lawyers” following circulation of Trainwiz’s Skyrim mod on YouTube. “It was some intermediary law firm based out of Macedonia, saying how I diminished the brand of Thomas by showing him blowing up (nothing about him violently murdering people),” Trainwiz said. “They issued takedown notices on the videos for it. The first time it got taken down. The second time YouTube told them it was covered under parody law, with no prompting from me. So that was nice.”
For now, Trainwiz’s Thomas the Tank Engine mod for Skyrim and now Morrowind remain online, and the scourge of one of gaming’s most famous memes continues.
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Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
