His father says it was down to peer pressure, but whatever the reason, Queensland native James Burt is today facing up to a $1.3 million (€942,000) settlement with Nintendo for illegally uploading a game to the internet six days before its global release. All this because the poor fella had bought the New Super Mario Bros Wii game when a shop accidentally put it on its shelves before the official sale date.

Nintendo has confirmed that it had settled the case with Burt, who hacked into New Super Mario Bros and set it free across the webnets on November 6, 2009. “The legal proceeding resulted in a settlement in which the individual will pay to Nintendo the sum of 1.5 million (Australian) dollars by way of damages to compensate Nintendo for the loss of sales revenue caused by the individual’s actions,” it said in a statement.

Burt had, according to PhysOrg, breached copyright law by hacking into it and illegally making it available on the Internet, causing the company to lose thousands of sales, Nintendo claimed. We reported a few weeks back that New Super Mario Bros for the Wii had hit 10.5 million so they’re hardly in the poor house but you can see their point.

Games are generally made available in Australia around six months after their release in the major markets of Japan and the United States, but in this instance Australia was ahead of the rest of the world, a move which may not be replicated in the wake of this business disaster.

“It wasn’t just an Australian issue, it was a global issue. There was thousands and thousands of downloads, at a major cost to us and the industry really,” Nintendo Australia managing director Rose Lappin said.

Nintendo said when it discovered the game was online, it used computer forensics experts to identify the individual responsible. Burt, a part time freight worker, also has to pay legal costs of $100,000 (€72,500). He’s not commenting on the matter but his dad told the Sydney Morning Herald that his son is, “A very quiet lad, he’s a fanatical computer game player – to his detriment. It was peer pressure on the internet forums and the blog sites that led him to do a very very silly thing to prove that he’d actually managed to purchase a game before its release date. It was certainly [done] with no malice or intent to make money – he actually bought the game legitimately from a major retailer.”