Cognition Dissemination: From Emuparadise to Emuhellscape

Video game hardware emulation programs and their accompanying software ROMs have been around the internet for years, to the point that several in the gaming community justifiably figured they would always be there.

The emulation scene started taking off between the late 90s and early 00s, after several realized they could finally play older games they missed out on but were long out of print. Some games were also first released in different territories, but not others. This included games translated in English that didn’t release in certain English-speaking territories like Terranigma and Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen, which missed America and Europe, respectively — though the latter eventually arrived in Europe. Others, however, simply wanted the opportunity to play free games, regardless of whether there was a legal way to acquire them.

If you’ve only followed the efforts of companies who’ve been desperately trying to kill the emulation scene for years, you’d think everyone who uses emulators to play games just wants free stuff. But that’s not the case, as seen through the other examples above. Communities have also translated Japanese games that were never localized by certain publishers, and likely won’t be in the future. Square Enix, for instance, is unlikely to officially release Japan-only SNES/Super Famicom games like Treasure of the Rudras and Bahamut Lagoon in English at this point, which is why these communities stepped in to provide a good translation free of charge.

These are good points to bring up, because recent news suggests that the entire emulation scene could be in danger. It was a wake-up call when Emuparadise, an emulation and ROM library site that’s been around since 2000, confirmed it was deleting all the ROMs on their site. They didn’t exactly spell out why initially, but it was easy for anyone who follows emulation news to guess what led to this. This came shortly after Nintendo filed legal action against two other well-known ROM sites, LoveROMs and LoveRETRO, which they claimed are infringing on their IPs by selling illegal software. While Emuparadise founder Masj says he’s dealt with several DMCA takedowns for individual games throughout the site’s eighteen-year history, but Nintendo’s actions are the most serious effort to take down ROMs yet.

While this is bad news for the benefits emulation can provide stated above, it’s sobering news for game preservation. As Frank Cifaldi said in a tweet, ROM sites being shut down wouldn’t be as bad if game companies actually gave a crap about preserving their classic games. Unfortunately, the gaming industry lags far behind the movie, book publishing, and music industries when it comes to this.

One of the most grievous offenders here just happens to be Nintendo. When the Virtual Console was still being supported on Wii, 3DS, and Wii U, several games were never released on the platform. That is, if they could release, due to compatibility issues (see Yoshi’s Island) or licensing issues. Problems with the VC became even worse when purchases couldn’t be transferred from one system to another, as several owners had to rebuy classic games if they wanted them on both Wii U and 3DS.

Worse, their current system, the Nintendo Switch, won’t have a VC at all, and will instead offer classic NES games (and potentially others) on an On Demand-like service for online subscribers. There’s no assurance that the games will stay on the service or systems for good, so it’s no way to preserve classic software. And those games purchased on previous systems may be stuck there forever.

Nintendo is currently making money on the NES Classic and SNES Classic Editions. But these special consoles only come with a very small number of the games released for the systems throughout the years, and there’s no way to install more on them.

Just because Nintendo is the biggest target here doesn’t mean other console manufacturers are innocent. Several PSOne games were rereleased digitally as PSOne Classics on the PlayStation Store, accessible through PS3, PSP and Vita. Unfortunately, they can’t be played on Sony’s current system, the PS4. Despite the weaker systems being able to play them fine, Sony hasn’t commented on why they’re still not playable on PS4 despite it being nearly five years old. The only PSOne games playable on PS4 are remade titles, like PaRappa the Rapper, the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, and the upcoming Spyro Reignited Trilogy. Fortunately, they’re not as bad as Nintendo here with going after emulation sites, though they have a history of pursuing action against companies for distributing things in a way they don’t like. Never forget Lik-Sang.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has been as good as they can be with this. The Xbox 360 played the limited number of Xbox titles that emulation would allow for, while the Xbox One is slowly but surely adding more backwards-compatible 360 games. They don’t have as large as an overall archive as Sony, Nintendo, and several other third-party publishers, but they’ve been good with what they have.

Sega has been one of the best publishers when it comes to making their classic titles readily available, which is hilarious if you experienced or are familiar with the 90s console wars. They always release and rerelease archived titles for several platforms, through collections or individual releases. They’re far from perfect, though, since the collections tend to have worse emulation than the individual digital releases, the latter being notably more expensive than the former. They also overwhelmingly favor Sega Genesis/Mega Drive titles, and Master System titles to a lesser extent, while classic Dreamcast and especially Sega Saturn games still don’t get enough attention.

Unless they have some kind of retro paradise Virtual Console service coming to Switch, Nintendo is doing everyone who enjoys classic games a disservice by cracking down on emulation sites. It’s tough to imagine a future without emulation and ROMs, where we’ll have to start digging through the seediest corners of the internet to find them, but it’s hardly unfathomable now. For as many editorials are going up to try and convince Nintendo to stand down, there’s not much stopping them from continuing down this road.