OPINION -- The Emulation Situation

A few months ago, Nintendo stated that they were going to start aggressively shutting down and punishing ROM sites and other various outlets of "unauthorized" copies of their games floating around the internet. The biggest hit came from the news this week of EmuParadise, one of the biggest and most popular ROM and emulations sites opting to shut their libraries down. This has created a sense of mass paranoia among retro gamers and gamers in general.

I wanted to offer my opinion on this matter as it's something that's going to affect ALL gamers at some point.

I'll start off with a question. What are you going to do when your favorite game is no longer available? Are you going to search countless hours on the Internet, hoping you can snag a deal on a physical copy for your console platform of choice? Or will you simply just pull up the nearest emulation website and just download the desired title at your leisure? Most people are going to go with the later in terms of simplicity and the fact that they don't have to break the bank for one of those rare most-sought-out-after titles.

I would be lying if I said that I have never emulated any video games or downloaded/made any copies of the ones that I own for my own personal enjoyment. At the same time, I'm not going to tell everyone to just scramble out while they can and just buy a Raspberry Pi to preserve the history of the video game industry by downloading every ROM file - old and new - that they can possibly get their hands on.

There's a ton of titles that have eluded me over the years, especially now in retrospect. I regret not buying .hack// Quarantine (Part 4) for PlayStation 2 when it was still at normal retail price instead of the outstanding price it goes for currently online. I can even remember seeing the PlayStation 2 copy of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 being sold at the local Gamestop Used for $300+, sitting on the shelf plain as day. There's a lot of titles that you're going to have to pay top dollar for physical copies on the second hand market, especially for titles that Sony, Sega, nor Nintendo bothered to provide digital remasters or just simply re-releases of.

A friend of mine gave me his copy of MvC2 on PS2 and I still have it to this day. That pricing is ridiculous, especially when there better ports than the PS2 version out there.

Boy, I wish I bought that back when it was $60 on PS2 originally...

Legit pricing going on Ebay right now for these games...

Here's the thing. All the time I hear gamers left and right throw out that preservation excuse to their emulation needs. Let's be real here. Most people care just as much as preserving the rocks and dirt in their backyard than they do about preserving video games. I run across so many poorly kept gaming consoles in my travels that it just flat out disgusts me. The average person isn't going to play every single console release in their lifetime so this idea of preservation eludes me, when in reality, it's just a facade to show off how big their gaming libraries are and add another feather to their caps to their make-believe digital penis that strokes their egos. At the end of the day, it's just more mental masturbation to help them sleep comfortably in their beds at night.

It's the same mindset as those PC gamers who are always talking about "the Master Race" like this is some kind of competition for superiority when gaming is supposed to ALWAYS be about the great experiences first and foremost that they provide and the platform/consoles themselves be secondary.

No, I don't care about how your keyboard projects a hologram into the air and makes more screens to work on that would make Tony Stark blush. I just want to play the damn game.

Emulation isn't even an accurate form of preservation of this medium. Unless you have the original console(s) and setup like how the developers and creator(s) intended then your argument is moot. On top of that, the majority of the ROMs available on the internet aren't "pure" copies of the original game(s) and have been modified with in some way. It's the same as preservation older films and visual media in film theory. If you're not experiencing the medium in it's classic, original - unaltered - format as how the creator of said media intended it, then it's not historically accurate.

Of course, you're going to have that argument from those people who are anal and sticklers for details who will point out that playing these older games in their original formats is next to impossible in a lot of cases, such as a lot of current generation televisions are HDTV and 4K resolutions only. In that regard, I humbly agree that emulation provides a lot of accessibility for both gamers and preservationists. Some of these platforms are unable to be experienced in their original format today. That's a problem that will continue to increase as time wears on.

Guess who's NOT buying that for a dollar? This guy right here...

I'm not going to sugarcoat this when I say that Nintendo are scam artists. At the same time, they are smart when it comes to supply and demand. They always seem to create a shortage of supply when it's something their fan base, especially the nostalgia hungry ones, want to make it a top dollar item on the secondary market, thanks to it's "limited" release (those "rare" Amiibos say hello, especially when those were ranging as low as $1 to $5 when Toys R Us was going out of business a few months ago. Boy, I know the folks who paid the extra dough to import those things for triple or quadruple of their retail value online feel stupid now), only to go reverse the decision a few months to a year later with the same product back in circulation. It's annoying as fuck to their consumers but you can't deny that it works - hook, line, and sinker - EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.

That being said, Nintendo are the biggest culprits when it comes to being stingy about the availability of their consoles' back library. I'm not sure if the Switch has a Virtual Console like the Wii and Wii U before it and even if it did, Nintendo would probably be just as picky and selective on titles for that as they've been in years past. I can't fathom how pissed off their fan base were to find out that they were sitting on a complete working version of Star Fox 2 for the SNES for roughly three decades now, only to pull that magic trick out of their hats when the SNES Classic needed another shot of the cannon to sell more units. That goes without saying that the SNES Classic, much like the NES Classic before it, was going to be a sought after item regardless out of pure nostalgia. It holds a mere faction of the titles that a Raspberry Pi can hold (after hacking the console it can be made to hold and run more titles), but the joy of having the nostalgia of this product simply can't be matched. The feeling of holding a genuine NES/SNES controller in your hands while you fire up the SNES/NES for an afternoon of gaming delight is a welcome memory to a lot of gamers, especially those that have grown up and have children of their own that they would pass that experience down to.

Nintendo cracking down on piracy of their products and infringements of copyright on their media from streamers isn't the first case of this and it definitely won't be the last. You can't even stream nor upload video content from any Nintendo products on YouTube without it getting flagged. Evolution Championship Series, the biggest fighting game annual tournament series, almost got their ENTIRE Smash Bros. tournament shut down a few years ago from even being shown on the tournament live feed until Nintendo execs got involved and reversed the decision from the sheer backlash it was causing in the news. They've mellowed out on that front for the sake of the Smash community, but it hasn't stopped Nintendo sweeping in and laying down the law wherever they see fit. Another instance of this was the fan-made remake to Metroid II: Return of Samus, AM2R (Another Metroid II Remake), was issued a DMCA notice to the sites that were hosting that game (which was free-to-play and completely non-profit from my understanding) and immediately got it taken down a day later. Then don't get me started on how many Let's Play "YouTubers" who stream and upload exclusively Nintendo-based content got their content flagged and their channels suspended. Nintendo's been on this witch hunt for a long time and aren't showing any signs of slowing down.

What's ironic that in the wake of Nintendo cracking down on piracy, they have actually profited off of emulation in the past. Some media outlets have reported that the Wii Virtual Console version of the original Super Mario Bros. (NES) is reportedly an emulator download that Nintendo took liberty to resell for their own profit. I wouldn't be surprised if this wasn't the first time, nor will it be the last time when it comes to stuff like that from not only Nintendo but the gaming industry as a whole.

In the wake of those events, I saw what EmuParadise did as a preventative measure. They wanted to dodge the bullet before it even came out of the chamber. It's similar to what happened to both the original iterations of KickAssTorrents and Pirate Bay a few years ago. They got shut down by the feds cracking down on Internet piracy, only to pop up again stronger than ever. I mean, c'mon let's face facts here. People are ALWAYS going to find a way to get something for free over the Internet. EmuParadise may have stopped providing to the masses, but that's not going to stop anyone else from finding a healthy supply of ROMs floating around on the Internet. If you're that hard-up for emulation, I suggest keeping your eyes out for a few big torrent files that people are going to start dumping online to accommodate for EmuParadise going down to keep the emulation game going strong.

Am I saying that what Nintendo is doing okay? No, but I see the method of their madness so to speak. They want to keep control of preserving their own history instead of leaving it to independent individuals making a profit off their licensed content. Trusting that preservation entirely to Nintendo is a fool's errand though as many developers in Japan and not just former Nintendo employees and/or collaborators have spoken out in interviews over the years stating that it's difficult to preserve their own work when the physical copies just keep disappearing, never to be seen again. That's even harder for mother boards from old arcade machines or the CD-Roms from first generation disk-based games when that physical medium erodes after a few years.

There's a few true preservationists out there, such as Byuu, who created the SNES emulator higan, who was preserving every SNES physical release until he was slowed down by UPS mysteriously lost his package. He's got the package back since the first few reports came out, but Byuu is renown name within the retro gaming community for his efforts to preserve gaming's history and continues to contribute to the emulation end of the spectrum.

Speedrunners, such as TheMexicanRunner, have adopted the standing of being a "purist" to the medium as well. TheMexicanRunner is known for chronicling his journey to complete (or at least play until it's considered "complete" by gamers' standards for some of those titles that recycle/reuse data infinitely) EVERY original NES release by cartridges donated to him and those that he bought under his own accord. Undertaking this chore has inspired him to legitimately own all of those titles and he's almost done with that to my knowledge. That's what I regard being a "purist" to preserving the history of this medium, not downloading a stockpile of ROMs to run on emulators on your suped up PC, only to play them with an USB-powered PlayStation 2 controller or Sega Saturn/Genesis 6-button controller that isn't even native to that console generation then get the fuck outta here with that noise. That's not being a purist, that's your own personal preference to the experience - HUGE difference there.

Preservation of this medium is going to be the key for the years to come. Many are going to see Nintendo's witch hunt as an attack on gamers, but at the same time, some of the gamers up in arms are the ones to blame for the lack of care and delicacy that these consoles and games deserve to continue working for years on end. My parents bought me a NES back in roughly 1987 and it still works perfectly fine without a hitch to this day in 2018. How many of you can say that your original NES is still working and doesn't have discoloring and/or any damage at all? We as gamers are just as responsible for preserving the history of this medium as the companies that manufactured them. The blame here is a two way street and a lot of people seem to be having tunnel vision on that matter. Nintendo aren't innocent in this conversation as well, when there has been time tested proof that Nintendo has gone as far as selling ROMs to their consumers that was plucked off the Internet instead of the original medium, leaving them as guilty as gamers for this emulation crime.

A sensible solution would be some archive hosting somewhere that allows gamers and the companies tied to them to trade, exchange, catalog these snippets of gaming history for the generations of gamers to come. Even I don't want to admit this, but the physical media isn't going to last forever. Somehow, someway, the gaming industry as a whole - along with the support of the gamers that love these beloved games - past, present, and future - need to work together to ensure that these games don't disappear forever.