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Nintendo's ridiculous war on ROMs threatens gaming history- PC World

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Last week Nintendo sued two long-standing emulation sites: LoveRETRO and LoveROMs. It's not the first time emulation's come under attack, but it was noteworthy in part because of the absurd damages Nintendo cited: $2 million for illicit use of their trademark, plus $150,000 for each Nintendo game hosted.

It's ridiculous. Those amounts have no basis in reality. Like the days when the MPAA went around suing random torrenters, Nintendo levied the sort of threat designed to make sites immediately genuflect and then beg for leniency—and that's exactly what both sites did, removing all Nintendo ROMs and in the case of LoveRETRO shutting down completely.

Now it's spreading, with EmuParadise announcing this week that it was preemptively pulling all ROMs from its site. Immense damage is being done to an old and well-established community in a short period of time, a community that's almost singlehandedly kept game preservation efforts alive for decades, and for what?
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Emulation saved these games for decades, and nobody's stepped up with an alternative. Not Nintendo, not anyone. If emulation persists, it's because of a failure on the part of the actual rights-holders, not the audience. Movie and music piracy dropped after the advent of Netflix and Spotify. The convenience of GOG.com wooed countless PC pirates, including myself, from downloading what we used to call "abandonware."

But GOG.com still covers a mere sliver, and only PC games for the most part. You won't find old NES or SNES games there—not to mention platforms Nintendo doesn't control. The company that currently calls itself Atari is happy to put out collections of certain top-tier games, but again it's the core one percent of "classics" people remember. And what about games for the Vectrex? The TurboGrafx? No corporation is saving those. No corporation is bothering with reissues.
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You can read the full article here (I encourage you to), but I think it makes some very salient, biting points. Especially when no company, not even Nintendo, is interested in games preservation- emulation is all we have. And waging war on emulation means waging war on trying to preserve the history of this very young medium.
 
Eolz

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It's pretty shitty yeah.
I just find it funny that it's a PC website that makes an article about preserving emulation.
 
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Deleted member 249

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Eolz said:
It's pretty shitty yeah.
I just find it funny that it's a PC website that makes an article about preserving emulation.
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I mean, PC is the realm of preservation for all abandonware, software, shareware and the like to begin with. So it does make sense. Video game companies sure as hell aren't doing it, either natively on their hardware, or via support for software solutions.
I wish the Virtual Console would come back...
 

Deleted member 1413

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Nintendo preserves their games more than most companies.
Rom sites are piracy so it's a bit weird to see people going all out defending it.

Hopefully in a few years sites take the hint and just focus on abandonware and leave commercially available games out of their listings
 
Velocity:Design:Comfort

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"I can't copy it and play it for free anymore" doesn't mean its not preserved. Nor does it mean its not preserved because it's not on whatever device you like (and still supported devices like new 3ds actually do sell snes nes games). cartridges still exist.
 
SMD

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Cartridge Games said:
Nintendo preserves their games more than most companies.
Rom sites are piracy so it's a bit weird to see people going all out defending it.

Hopefully in a few years sites take the hint and just focus on abandonware and leave commercially available games out of their listings
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Define abandonware and define commercially available. Is Panzer Dragoon Saga commercially available? Castlevania Bloodlines? How about Megaman The Wily Wars?
 
Glio

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The obvious solution is that those sites only upload games that can not be purchased on current platforms.

To join in the same case lost arcades of the 80s with A Link to the Past is absurd.
 
Eolz

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Phantom Thief said:
I mean, PC is the realm of preservation for all abandonware, software, shareware and the like to begin with. So it does make sense. Video game companies sure as hell aren't doing it, either natively on their hardware, or via support for software solutions.
I wish the Virtual Console would come back...
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Of course. I'm just saying that it's catering to the crowd, you regularly see articles about emulation from those websites, so it's nothing new.
It's a lot more interesting when it's either generalists or console centrics websites doing that.
 

Deleted member 442

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Phantom Thief said:
I wish the Virtual Console would come back...
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I recognise that the Wii Service is no longer around, but you can still buy Virtual Console games on the Wii U and the 3DS. That hasn't gone away has it?

The funny thing is that the article references Turbo Grafx games not being sold by anyone anymore, but you can still get a lot of these on the Wii U eshop, even the PS3 store has some Turbo Grafx games in the USA.
 
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Eolz said:
Of course. I'm just saying that it's catering to the crowd, you regularly see articles about emulation from those websites, so it's nothing new.
It's a lot more interesting when it's either generalists or console centrics websites doing that.
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Yeah, absolutely. The trouble is that most console paradigms don't even understand the concept or importance of preservation and digital continuity (remember, backward compatibility wasn't even a "thing" on consoles with few exceptions until PS2 and Wii, and eventually, those console lines also forsook BC, and BC still remains a unique talking point).
It's a crying shame, because we are treating the history of games as a medium very cavalierly.
 
TyrantGuardian

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Cartridge Games said:
Nintendo preserves their games more than most companies.
Rom sites are piracy so it's a bit weird to see people going all out defending it.

Hopefully in a few years sites take the hint and just focus on abandonware and leave commercially available games out of their listings
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I will literally never ever trust a corporation to do anything of moral value. It is literally the duty of the people to refuse to leave this type of stuff up to corporations. This applies even if Nintendo actually preserved 100% of their catalogue, which they haven't.

That said, I disagree with this article. Preservation of ROMs hasn't been reliant on sites like these for well over a decade. No one interested in the preservation of video games was building their library from poorly tagged and sometimes poorly ripped ROMs off of emuparadise lmao.

Tron1 said:
Ha! Wonder how the narrative would change of it was someone else.
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Uh... not at all?
 
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ibrahima said:
I recognise that the Wii Service is no longer around, but you can still buy Virtual Console games on the Wii U and the 3DS. That hasn't gone away has it?

The funny thing is that the article references Turbo Grafx games not being sold by anyone anymore, but you can still get a lot of these on the Wii U eshop, even the PS3 store has some Turbo Grafx games in the USA.
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The Wii U VC was, if I am not wrong, about 10% the size of the Wii VC (at least in the west, my understanding is it was bigger still in Japan).
 
New Fang

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If Nintendo were actively trying to celebrate their own legacy on their current platform, the Switch, I could better understand their aggressive crack down on ROMS. But as we all know that's simply not the case.

Including 30 games on the NES Classic, and 21 on the SNES Classic is doing the bare minimum.
 

Deleted member 1413

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New Fang said:
If Nintendo were actively trying to celebrate their own legacy on their current platform, the Switch, I could better understand their aggressive crack down on ROMS. But as we all know that's simply not the case.
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Nintendo is releasing NES games for cheap starting next month.
They released the arcade original version of Donkey Kong and Sky Skipper in the last month.
 

TimPV3

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Cartridge Games said:
Using a rom for Mario over a decade ago changes nothing of what i said? It's their game.
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The fact that they had to use a publicly available ROM from one of these places absolutely contradicts what you said, because if they did have their own games preserved, they would use their own ROM.

EDIT: For some reason I thought it was the release of Mario All Stars that had the ROM in question, my mistake.
 
Treasure Silvergun

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Cartridge Games said:
Nintendo preserves their games more than most companies.
Rom sites are piracy so it's a bit weird to see people going all out defending it.

Hopefully in a few years sites take the hint and just focus on abandonware and leave commercially available games out of their listings
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You're not wrong.

Then again, no matter how many times Nintendo rereleases Punch-Out!!, we're not gonna see Mike Tyson in the game ever again. That's part of gaming history, as well. And it's just an example out of many.

Then you see someone rerelease fucking Night Trap for its 25th anniversary, and you know gaming preservation is a shitshow.

Piracy is illegal, but it's the only way a lot of software has been saved from oblivion. The medium being young and subject to modern copyright laws is the reason it's a bit different from other mediums where such preservation would be highly acclaimed. Imagine if movie piracy allowed us to retrieve the immense amount of movies lost from the early age of cinema. Think you'd hear movie enthusiasts and studios complain? I doubt it.

And now, cue the usual deluge of posts going all like "JFC at the people defending/advocating piracy in here, WTF Era?".
 
Burai

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To paraphrase a tweet from last week.

Me: "I want to play Super Mario Sunshine but my GameCube is packed away. I'll just download this ISO and play it on my PC."

Nintendo: "No. ROM sites are costing us millions of dollars in lost revenue."

Me: "Fine, I'll pay for it on the eShop and play it on my Switch instead."

Nintendo: "Also no."
 
AlexBasch

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I liked the guy who posted the Terranigma example in the other thread. Can't remember if anyone actually tried to debunk his claim.

Remember, if you're from the American continent and played the game, you're pirate scum because the game was never released in NA and we all should obey corporate limitations on what or what we cannot experience and enjoy.
 
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Velocity:Design:Comfort said:
You put in the time, work and money to find them like I have any dozens of others on here and theres many online and in person sources for retro games.

They have as much value or more as they used to...so why should they be free on a pc? Its a slap in the face to the actual market for actual copies of these games.
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So I should spend like $400 on an old SNES cart? After putting in the "time and effort"?
 

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TimPV3 said:
It was less than 8 years ago, and the fact that they had to use a publicly available ROM from one of these places absolutely contradicts what you said, because if they did have their own games preserved, they would use their own ROM.
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Where do you think Roms come from?
They're dumped from carts. If you think Nintendo couldn't find a copy of SMB then I'm not sure what to say, it's likely just them trying to save some effort while the VC was new
 
Nacho

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Velocity:Design:Comfort said:
"I can't copy it and play it for free anymore" doesn't mean its not preserved. Nor does it mean its not preserved because it's not on whatever device you like (and still supported devices like new 3ds actually do sell snes nes games). cartridges still exist.
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I don't think you understand technology nor preservation.

Cartidges and systems don't last forever. Discs and disc drives especially don't. A lot of systems aren't made anymore and those that are soon won't be.


And there's more to preservation than things simply existing somewhere in people collection cabinets never to be taken out and played. The actual game being preserved for future generations is the pt.
 
TheMisterManGuy

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I'm all for preserving history of the gaming medium. But you have to remember, Unofficial ROMs are illegal. They're not distributed legally, they're not obtainable legally, and the companies don't see a penny when you download one. It's perfectly understandable why Nintendo and other companies would be against this kind of stuff since is basically stealing. I mean, I've done emulation myself, but it's not something I would encourage other people to do without also supporting official releases, I emulated WarioWare and F-Zero on my PC, but I also made sure to buy the VC releases of those games as well. If these companies want to preserve gaming history, then they should be doing more compilations and re-releases. That's usually how it works, you don't need illegal sites to do that.
 
SmarmySmurf

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Cartridge Games said:
Using a rom for Mario over a decade ago changes nothing of what i said? It's their game.

Piracy of games not in public domain is still piracy especially for games still commercially available.
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It means they don't even have their own internal ROM for the sake of preservation, so you're fucking wrong that they are 'better than most' with preservation.

And IDGAF about your second point, it is already addressed in my previous post. It doesn't matter if its piracy, piracy is not inherently "evil" or wrong and repeating the fact that its piracy doesn't change anything. Yes, it is piracy. And it doesn't matter.
 
Flame Flamey

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Where do fan translation patches of games that never left Japan fall in the spectrum of ethical consumption? Do you have to buy a Japanese cartridge first, or download it from the Japanese e-shops before you can call yourself not a pirate?
 
Tetra-Grammaton-Cleric

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Cartridge Games said:
Nintendo preserves their games more than most companies.
Rom sites are piracy so it's a bit weird to see people going all out defending it.

Hopefully in a few years sites take the hint and just focus on abandonware and leave commercially available games out of their listings
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You're missing the point.

Sites like these being sued will invariably pull ALL ROMS down even though much of what they have hasn't been available through any other means for years, sometimes decades.

Nintendo has a legal right to do this but their actions are both selfish and short-sighted when you consider the ramifications of losing the ability to access thousands of games, most of which will probably never get another retail release, meaning they could eventually be lost entirely.

Yes, piracy is an issue (and an issue that will always persist) but ROMs have also been crucial in maintaining and archiving a medium whose own gatekeepers seem to have little interest in preservation.
 
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