You know what’s rad? Old console emulators. You get a cheap controller, run a google search for games, and after handful of clicks you’re back in the 90’s, screaming and cursing at the bad graphics and your own incompetence, just like the good old days.
If you’ve ever loaded up a Super Nintendo ROM from your PC in the last couple decades, you probably came across a website like EmuParadise that provides resources for emulators like ROMs and related files. These kind of sites have always existed in a gray area. Legally speaking, emulators are perfectly legal on their own, but running third party games retrieved from the internet is still illegal. The question of whether it's legit to make backup copies of ROMs from games you own has never been settled in court.
These sites have been around since the year some of our sites’ readers were born, but Nintendo is currently flexing hard to do away with these types of sites. Their standpoint on ROMs is no secret; on their website, they state that “play[ing] illegally copied Nintendo software represents the greatest threat to date to the intellectual property rights of video game developers,” and believes that you should only be allowed to have ROMs that you yourself backup, not retrieve from the internet.
Several weeks ago, Nintendo decided to militate against loveROMS.com and loveRETRO.co by hitting them with massive lawsuits, demanding $150,000 in statutory damages per hosted game and $2 million for each trademark infringement. They’re also demanding injunctions on the sites, ownership of the domains, and records on where all the ROMs were downloaded from. Per their lawsuit, damages collected could potentially reach $100,000,000. Damn!
Earlier this year, hackers figured out that the Switch has all sorts of flaws that can be utilized for modding, long after Nintendo shipped out many of its consoles. Because they can’t fix this, the company is opting to purge the internet of sites that provide emulation materials.
Console manufacturers tend to go all out when it comes to protecting their platforms, and because of the influx of retro consoles we’ve seen in recent times, I won’t be surprised if Nintendo keeps this up. "Nintendo obviously wanted to send a message here — I'd say they did.
