Game Preservation am I right? but what about Retro Gaming Documentary preseravtion? Well, lucky for you, I just released SEGA: The Complete History on blu-ray, check it out right here... vinegarsyndrome.com/collections/etr-media/products/slopes-game-room-sega-the-complete-history-vol-1 Together for the 1st time on Blu-ray, we have 10 of my most popular documentaries based around SEGA's most recognisable IPs. Here are some of the features... -Exclusive re-edits, re-recordings and re-captures for some of the older videos found in this compilation. -Exclusive introductions and commentaries for each entry, plus an exclusive guest commentary too -Over an hour of special features -Animated menus for each game that showcase the history of every title -Reversible box art created by the legendary Zombie Workshop (the reverse not seen here should please Master System fans) -Reversible slipcover that changes the theme from NTSC to PAL And, finally, for those quick enough to get the slipcover (almost 200/1000 have sold in the last hour) you may find a hidden message inside that will help you unlock all of this blu-ray's easter eggs! Grab your copy here & thanks again for the support vinegarsyndrome.com/collections/etr-media/products/slopes-game-room-sega-the-complete-history-vol-1

At least Emulation helps with preserving older games 😅

I have to contest that the take down of the major sites only catapulted emulation even further into the mainstream (and alternatives to those sites that where just as big already existed) and overall it's even easier now to find roms and in fact it's even easier to get a whole company's library from inception to today. They literally lost complete control to the point that it's not even seen as piracy anymore, and those company's are seen as the bad guy's not the people hosting roms or the people in general reliving their childhood's ect~ I've backed up my games since the PS1, and I will get any game that I owned and did not resell for emulation no matter who think's the thing I brought is somehow not mine because of time or format.

Once anything hits the Internet, it's never really gone. Rom sites still exist, but during the "purge" of rom sites . I downloaded everything I needed on multiple hard drives. Generations of games. But good video

Emulation is preservation, and it is a given fact because of the trend of all companies going digital in a near future. Many games have become abandonware or cease to exist. The work we do ensures that future generations can access this cultural products.

Some ROMs you can't buy the game even.

The games industry is the absolute worst when it comes to old titles. Imagine if the only way to watch Die Hard at home was on VHS. People would find another way to watch their beloved movie. If game companies don’t want people emulating, they need to make wayyyy more of their older titles available, in a similar way to how a huge amount of old movies and music are readily available on modern media.

Don't forget the part where the Wii/Wii U/3DS eshops are no longer active... at least not to new purchases as far as I'm aware. There's been a movement started on this whole preservation thing getting companies to take notice of this sorta thing. I think my favorite take on giving folks access to the retro content like they were talking about so far, has to be antstream! 1400 games for $30USD a year was a pretty sweet deal. Wish more companies would sign on but most of them are just doing their own thing.

Look at the Arcade games of X-Men, Simpsons or AvP! Good luck figuring the rights holders on those properties...

Dang I had no idea emulation went back this far. That's wild!

I remember when I was a kid in the 90's and early 2000's when emulators on PC became massive. Happy times!

The fact that 87% of all video games are unavailable to purchase on modern consoles is absolutely depressing. I think that if a company makes something unavailable to purchase, without having to go to third parties and paying exorbitant prices, I believe that the customer should have the right to be able to play these games, through whatever means, since the companies aren't making money on the games anymore anyways.

Had it not been for emulation there's hundreds of games i would have never tried or would have never played again after only playing them once at some arcade i could never go again as a kid.

Back then, being part of the emulation scene was being part of the Fight Club. We don't talk about Fight Club. Real talk, the more mainstream emulation got, the more controversial it became. :/ Like putting aside all legality, morality, preservation etc. I just want to play the games from my past as well as discover ones I never got to play.

The first person that I can recall that emulated retro games (not saying that no one else did so before), was Rebecca Heinaman A.K.A. Burger Becky using a modded APPLE II to run Atari VCS games. She's worth talking to about this. I highly suggest that you do so.

Nintendo is the reason I put all my collections on a drive and give the links out to people.

Emulation itself was LEGAL, that's why Bleem won the case against Sony, Camerica win the case against Nintendo. but ROM / ISO is a copyrighted material, basically a piracy.

Emulation and ROM piracy is a really tricky subject since, while these companies are well within their legal rights to send C&D's to any site they find distributing their ROMs, the sad fact is that the overwhelming majority of these ROMs are not available legally for modern platforms; For every Super Mario Bros there's a Devil World, Low G Man, Ultimate Stuntman, Dr. Chaos, Xexyz that might never see a rerelease, and even doubly so if you're talking licensed games like Little Nemo: The Dream Master, Disney's Adventures in the Magical Kingdom, Gremlins 2, The Three Stooges. Then you got games from companies that have long since went defunct, it's still illegal to distribute those games, but no one's around to legally distribute them anymore! As for how we can solve this? I see two options: The least likely is serious reform to terms of copyright. I don't know about copyright laws abroad, but in the US it is roughly, (a headache because it depends on who, but for simplicity's sake, I'll say) 95 years. Almost a century! That is WAY too long for something to remain copyrighted as too much media can fall through the cracks of the archives of whoever owns the copyright and you also can't trust a company will be around for 95 years. And it didn't used to be this long either. The term used to be a still lengthy, but not ungodly so 55 years, and before that I believe the term was 20-25 years. I'd say that that is long enough for someone to make money before a work's sales fall off. Now I doubt lawmakers would ever shorten copyright terms at all let alone rolling them back to their original lengths, but I'd say they should be short enough that retro games can be safely preserved and distributed by anyone rather than being gatekept by overly litigious companies like Nintendo. The other, more likely solution would be library reforms: creating a system that allowed libraries to purchase and distribute classic titles online the way they can with books. Currently, the only way you can play video games a library owns is if you physically play them on site, meaning if your library doesn't have any games or not the title you're looking for, you're shit outta luck. Since this is the avenue the Video Game History Foundation is actively perusing, this is currently the best solution even if it may still leave many games floating in limbo if they can't be obtained. Until then, those of us who want to play these lost gems, (and don't have the thousands of dollars to spend on eBay), will have to don the old black hat and eyepatch. Yarr! 🏴‍☠

Hear me out, this is a wild idea. But how about nintendo just sell their old products.

It's always ethical to pirate Nintendo games. Also I once attempted retro collecting in the mid 00s, and had to give up almost immediately due to the costs. Since that day I've been pretty much exclusively playing on emulators. Sure it's illegal, but it's like smoking weed, it hurts nobody and helps the user.

Honestly? a massive issue is the copywrite laws themselves. I think the distribution rights for games and films over 20 years old shouldn't be held by anyone. even if the characters and intellectual property are maintained by the company, it's silly to think they are milking money out of a game that is 2 decades old. and in the case they are NOT milking it... well... then it's just lost media, which is inexcusable in the digital era. it's lose lose.

as long as games are mostly abandoned by companies, emulation will always be the answer to that.

To me emulation is all about art preservation. Going out and buying an old, likely overpriced console along with overpriced old games is just not feasible for many people, including myself, and that's assuming the used consoles and games are even available for purchase at all. For example, the only way for me to play Blood Will Tell on the PS2 is either to hunt down a used PS2 along with the game for a lot of money, or just download a PS2 emulator and playing it near-perfectly replicated on my PC. The choice could not be more obvious.

Who else remembers downloading a pack of 100s of SNES roms and finding out some of them were not really games but hentai pixel porn? Teenager me was totally not happy about it...

Mob rule is going to win. Companies like Nintendo are selling their products for just a few years before abandoning them, and publishers do the same. In many cases, intellectual property is completely abandoned within 10 years. People continue to not tolerate that, and they continue to not tolerate rented content at full retail price or content that can be bought and then turned off on the customer. Before these companies can summon their lawyers, they should be legally required to first release details on how they have made efforts to maintain sales of that product. If they are fighting over abandoned products and IP, the cases need to be thrown out of court with heavy fines. Copyright law needs to be entirely rewritten to ensure our cultural history isn't lost inside of a generation over shitbag companies refusing to sell their products, only to pretend like their company has been hurt when other people are happy to circulate them. Copyright law needs to be "use it or lose it," not this bullshit 100 years of corporate rule nonsense.

I always wondered where the misconception "it's okay to emulate if you delete it within 48 hours" started. that persisted for quite a while. I heard it referenced even years later.

Awesome vid! The first time I ever played an emulator was on Pitfall The Mayan Adventure, it had an emulation of the original Atari 2600 Pitfall as an Easter egg in the game. First emulator I downloaded though was Nesticle though. A lot of my favorite retro games like River City Ransom and Gunstar Heroes I would have never played without emulation.

Boy, there was a lot more to all of this than I previously knew! Thanks for another information filled video! I always learn something new from your amazing content!

Emulation is sorta part and parcel with computing. Emulators were and have always been extremely important for programmers to target a system they don't have reliable access too.

There was often the idea that if you owned the physical copy, it was okay to download the rom. Though it has always been illegal. I wonder if these early emulators and the roms were not made available, would Nintendo even bothered creating the virtual console? Or would the SNES/NES classic Mini exist? The underground rom scene is still alive and won't die.

Back in the mid-00s when I was in high school, someone, I don't know who (cough cough), added a giant folder full of retro game roms and emulators to my school's main network storage folder. It was meant to be a network folder that students could access their documents from any PC in the school. But, instead the whole student body ended up discovering emulation. It was neat seeing people who normally weren't into gaming get into playing a lot of classic NES and SNES titles. I knew a lot of people who never really had any consoles, let alone internet growing up finally getting to enjoy a Nintendo console for the first time through emulating them during their free time at school.

Emulation is freedom... I refuse to pay high prices for old games

PC Emulation whas how i first rediscovered Super Mario RPG on the SNES. It was how i was reintroduced to the Donkey Kong County games on SNES, how i knew about fan translations, rom-hacks and started my love for Japanese exclusive games and Japan as a whole. Of course, nowadays i mainly just use Emulators for Rom-Hacks and fan translation stuff. I don't go out of my way to download Nintendo games unless they are something not in my neck of the woods. Sure, it is very dubious and immoral to own a rom of a game i didn't buy, but what choice do I and countless others have? Game preservation is very bad, not unlike film preservation and book preservation. It's why MST3K coined the phrase "Keep Circulating the Tapes" and that mentality should be applied to games, wether it be on a PC or official means. I mean... we only lost about a good chunk of software on the Wii U and 3DS eShops alone...

emulation is the only alternative to the dying phisical cartridges. some fake cartridges are in better shape than the original ones.

Emuparadise is still a viable option if you know the work arounds (nudge nudge, wink,wink) inspite of the loss of some of the better known and well loved rom sites. There are still just as many avalable online to download from. One of my faves offers up to date english patches of games we never got in the west. Its thanks to that emulation community that i get the opertunity to play disaster report 3 or racing lagoon or many of the other myriad of interesting games that only got an oficial japanese release. Its probably also one of the reasons that the emulation community gets realy angry with companies like nintendo when they try to cut off that supply rather than address the obvious gap in the market and offer up those games themselves. That's not to say piracy will ever go away. But i dont know anyone who emulates who aren't also collectors and we (yes im one) probably have more oficial hard copys of games than your average casual gamer who are the main market demographic for nintendo' sony and other large companies. Gaming is no longer niche after all but the emulation side of it is and probably always will be. The only people that exclusively emulate are those that genuinely cant afford to purchase new games at full prices. And they hardly harm the market if they had no intentions of purchasing in the first place. Nintendo probably doesn't even realise that the gamers theyre trying to cut off from obtaining their roms are their customers to begin with

It's why I follow specific rules when it comes to emulation. 1st one is any old system is free game. (I.e. anything considered obsolete, retro and/or is no longer getting official games made for it.) 3ds,psp,ps1,ps2,ps3,gb,gba,gbc,ds,atari 2600, wonderswan, sega saturn,sega Genesis,n64, psvita,neo geo pocket + color, gamecube,wii, sega master system, sega cd,nes,snes, etc. 2. Computer games that are pretty old are up for grabs (Diablo, fallout 1 and 2, planescape torment, etc) 3. Support official releases for Current systems. (Basically by games for your current gen games like switch and ps5)bonus if a remake of an older game comes out with unique features buy to support the company. (Megaman battle network legacy collection is a good example) I may sail the pirate flag but I have my rules same as the pirates of ole. I will always try to get the game legally especially if the company will receive the money. I'm not gonna spend 800 bucks on a old game that might work but will probably go bad in a year or 3, definitely not if my old console is on it's last leg. I love the fact I can play so many old games I've never even heard of or were before my time. I'm surprised that Sony, Nintendo and Xbox don't sell their older consoles or make new ones designed to play their older games. They would probably make a good amount of money off it.

I downloaded emulator just to play Pokemon on GBA. That is how I got into Pokemon series

The company that hasn't got the software on sale on ANY format, isn't losing any money when people play through emulation!

Using ROMs on an original NES/SNES console with an Everdrive, it's definitely LEGAL. What do you mean, Nintendo is saying otherwise? I've got a middle finger that proves them wrong.

I always thought flash cards were made for people who were like “fuck emulation!”.

I would like to see a law where if you don't make a game available for purchase for a fixed period, eg 20 years, it is considered abandonware and can be legally emulated.

Yuji Naka was one of the first to create an emulator? That's incredible.

If some kind of public domain law was set up specifically for gaming media and the preservation of older titles that would help. Like, if a titles license isn't updated by a certain amount of time (e.g. 20 or 30 years) and the game isn't redistributed on a new platform, then it falls into that category and is legal to emulate. It would force game companies into maintaining licenses for older games to stop what they consider piracy and loss of income. Otherwise the claim to that income would be considered abandoned. Just a thought.

No suggested solution will be realistic - because companies will fight back against any of it. Companies don't care about games. In fact, if they could, the would burn down all of them (because it would mean that they don't need to compeat with their own older products) My proposal - if you don't legally distribute any game on any current-gen platforms for 5 years - it's not yours anymore. It's not like you are selling it anyway.

Aren't almost all of the classic compilation ports emulated? There was also the Sega Smash Pack on PC, although Sonic Jam didn't use emulation apparently. Also the DC Sega Smash Pack was apparently popular in the emulation scene with people emulating other Genesis games and Gary Lake apparently deliberately left documentation for the emulator in the code.

Nintendo is never getting that $12 million from LoveRoms. What a way to ruin goodwill with the fans.

Honest question but if I purchase a mini console legally on Amazon full of roms would I be the current owner of said roms? Or at least am I not at fault due to the purchase?

Best way of preservation and for us living far from Japan, US or Europe ...in the 80s and early 90s (south America), gives us now the opportunity to discover, play and enjoy retro games that weren't main stream. We got Atari, Nintendo, Sega consoles...but with only a few games to choose if you weren't lucky enough to travel. And didn't get other consoles officially like NeoGeo, Jaguar, 3do or CDI. Long live the retro community!!!

I was 14 in 1994 and didn't know what the internet was, so I had no idea emulation was happening back then.

The only solution is to fix internal copyright law. 1. Copyright to original, non-derivative works last 25 years maximum. 1a. Format shifting does not create a derivative work. 1b. Minor changes to allow a work to function on a shifted platform does not create a derivative work. 2. If an original work is out of production or not available for NEW purchase for any reason for a period of 1. five consecutive years or 2. ten non-consecutive years the copyright immediately expires. 3. The copyright on derivative works lasts 50 years from the original date of publishing. 3a. When the copyright expires on the original work the DERIVATIVE copyright on ALL derivative works (including derivatives of derivative works) also expiries. 3b. The copyright on the (AS OROGINAL) sale of existing and new derivative works will last a maximum of ten years after the expiration of the original work.

ROMs are hard to find? Are you kidding? In a single download you can get every single game for an entire system. I wonder if those people that had to pay 12 million in damages are now pissed that the Archive site contains every single rom for every single game ever made up through xbox, PSP and Vita.

Most of it is abandonware. It's the gaming companies fault for not supporting their own products

Great vid! Keep up the good work!!

Nothing against the sites in this video, but i was raised a Zophars Domain fan, and ill die a Zophars Domain fan. Zophar was actually just a dude running his site, and ACTUALLY responded to me when i had questions about setting up certain emulators. Thats kind of amazing when i think about it.

snes9x was NOT the first ever emulator for the SNESWTF? CLUELESS it was zsnes

Back in 2002, I was in attending college. I sat at a particular computer. On the desktop of that computer, I found a folder on it that had a bunch of Nintendo ROMS on it along with a NES emulator. I asked myself who would leave such a thing on a school computer. I downloaded that same folder. That was the start of my collection into obtaining gamily emulators and roms. Later on, I downloaded an SNES emulator and a bunch of SNES roms. Then lastly a Sega Genisis emulator and roms. These were the only gaming systems that I dealt with for many years. Down the road, I learned of other gaming roms and emulators. I downloaded a Sega Model 2 emulator and roms that go with it. But the only game I actually play on Sega Model 2 is Gunblade New York. That was the first 3D game I came in contact with when I was younger. Now in 2023, I have many other emulators and roms that I downloaded and continue to play. I have MAME, Nintendo 64, Nintendo GameCube, and PlayStation 2.

If game companies REFUSE to make the games available for purchase then I say "YYAAAAARRRR!!!"

There were emulators way before the one mentioned at the beginning of this video. I can remember Mac emulators for DOS back in the day and Amiga emulators, etc.

As small as 8-16 bit games are. . Why not a Nintendo run, free, online retro arcade? Gamer profiles? Nintendo merch ads?❤💯‼️❤️

I've actually given a little thought to what might be a possible solution in the past. My idea is to basically be like GOG was when they first started out. Approach the publishers and rights holders for the games and try to negotiate deals with them to legitimately sell the ROMs for an appropriate price and give the owners due compensation. Of course, some publishers, particularly Nintendo, will likely never agree to such a deal for the games they own, and the games that are themselves based on licensed properties, like say Batman, are further complicated by those rights being held by yet other parties, but if even one company agreed to such a deal it could form a foundation to build up on.

I wanna see Yuji Naka's NES emulator for the mega drive! That sounds really cool

Once nintendo started cracking down on these sites I downloaded every single game on their platforms before gamecube. I share those with my friends when needed. Nintendo has done fuck all for preservation so it's up to us, legal or not.

Solution: Share massive rom dumps with everyone at conventions or such. Sell hard drives that just so happen to be full of roms by accident. Don't even have to waste time downloading them all.

Good job making the video exactly 20 minutes!

I’ve bought and rebought so many Nintendo games over the years, on the Wii VC, Wii U VC and even the 3DS VC not to mention original releases and official ports and remakes down the line. While not exactly legal I don’t feel bad if anyone decides to play Nintendo games via dubious means, especially if there does not exist a legal way to buy the game now. Nintendo Switch Online allows for access to some of the older games but it does not allow for ownership which isn’t a long term solution especially after they move on to the next console.

"The first ever emulator" -- uhhhh hardly. Emulators have been around for as long as there have been computers needing to run old code. There were commercial emulators in the 1980's, and hobbyist ones before that. What didn't happen until the 90's was that affordable personal computers were finally powerful enough to run action games when emulating older platforms.

in fact in australia technically a lot of this is actually legal, thats why technically all dvd and blu-ray have to be multi regional or unlocked.

Emulation + Rom = Game Preservation It may sting but that is a fact ;)

Emulation and ROMs are a preservation of digital history and should be treasured. In many cases it's still a grey area, that if you own the original cartridge then you can freely dump or own the rom. However distribution of said ROMs is what is considered the illegal/pirate activity. Which I honestly, don't feel should be illegal. #1. Almost no company is making money selling older generation/retro games. Nintendo has not published a NES, SNES, N64, or GameCube games in over a decade. The devices are no long supported by Nintendo, so why is the distribution of their ROMs illegal? Even the new releases of those old games on the Switch are NOT the same, we want those original games for use either on emulations of those original consoles or on a PC platform. #2. Many companies no longer exist or hold the rights to their games anymore. So many license product and games have disappeared because the creators no longer have the license, or worse the entire company went under and took their IP with them. So why is it illegal to preserve and play these games? (Stuff like Power Rangers SNES/Genesis, or EarthWorm Jim, or etc etc) #3. It's been proven multiple times that the ROMs NINTENDO uses were sourced from online ROM sets. The Super Mario Bros ROM in particular still had the dump code of the original dumper decades ago in the 90s.

Gaming historians would have a field day when emulation is in danger from big game companies.

You do such great research and find such crazy things

I've been using emulation since 1997. It only gets better every year. Hell, PS3 is almost fully functional.

I checked emuparadise so much back in the day, I was really into retro gaming, but even though retro games where not that exploitative expensive for an student with only pocket change the games I could get in my country were limited and importing from the US was prohibitely expensive, so donwloading roms and emulation were my bread and butter, and without I would've never got into so many franchises that I love today, I am no anarchist that only pirates games, now that I am an adult I pay for my games on consoles and PC, but if it wasn't for emulation of older and mostly abandonware titles, I would have never got to but games for certain franchises or creators.

You didn’t mention how you can download a torrent that has every Nintendo title ever, far easier than by navigating some old rom site.

13:50 Apologize for that spelling!

I've said for a long time - if Nintendo were smart they'd just run a reprint of some of their old consoles and games each year. Original hardware, everything as it was except maybe an HDMI port on them or something. People would fight each other in stores to get their hands on a real, new GBA or SNES.

All the companies did was cause for more ROM sites to pop up. As long as the companies don't create ways to enjoy their old libraries beyond digital stores that can disappear at any time (not to mention that your digital libraries aren't really yours), the sites will continue to flourish. Great video though

I'd like a debated between you and Lady Decade as she feels it's everyone god give right to download any rom cos buying it costs money.

KZfaq just suggested this video, so I watched it. It's good! But I question the conclusion in which you suggest the demise of two ROM sites make ROMs hard to come by these days. They're so commonplace I trip over thousands or more of them every time I'm "shopping" for new music or games or Hollywood's finest. Seriously. TENS of thousands of them lie around in big sorted, zipped batches all over the web.

As much as Nintendo wants to, they'll never completely destroy emulation, and they're only slowly making themselves look worse by continuing to do so. Nowadays they're known as the company that absolutely despises you if you aren't the ideal consoomer.

Don’t forget when the NES classic came out and hackers got a look at the ROM files on it they found code that was designed by hackers to get the original ROMs to work in the first place. Which means Nintendo downloaded Bootleg Roms and put them on their own official classic console

I honestly think the best answer would be for companies to sponsor these sites, allow them to profit off advertisement, while adding a small charge (no greater than $5) to the library.

Yes, I've downloaded the rom for Link to the past. I also own the snes cart, the gba cart, and I've bought it digitally on wii, wii u, 3ds, and sub to Nintendo Switch online.

Most of my gaming collection lives in storage in Scotland while I live in Wales. So I emulate to play the games I already own. Usually on my Pixel Fold with a Gamesir X2 Bluetooth. I'm not stealing. In fact I own several games (especially Final Fantasy ones) several times due to multiple ports.

The video game industry wanted to turn video games into fast food and never care about physical gaming and wanted to sell the next game in there menu. To this day the video game industry never call video games as "ART" as they rather wanted you to see them as disposable gaming.

The solution is simple: Public domain. The original releases of all games should be public domain after 25 years. Remakes and remasters should not provide extensions to that. Neither hsould sequels. Of course, the remasters, remakes and sequels get protextions uponr elease becuase they are unique and proper vresions in theri own right but the original release should be public domain.

Yeah, expecting people to delete their ROMs after a specified period was like asking to donate to the developers after being allowed to download a Shareware game for free. Thus, the Shareware model was adjusted to where only the first episode of a game was free and became the precursor to the modern Demo system. Likewise, emulation has evolved to reselling old games (and even clone systems upon expiration of certain rights) in legal ways, plus it has always been legal to use emulation to give away original content and to keep backups of your own games (technically only if you dump the ROMs yourself from your actual copies, but nobody cares much about that requirement). Still, it does enable piracy in a very easy manner, which continues to remain a legitimate problem if slightly less so for each ROM and flash cart site that gets shut down.

"hang on slooopy... slooopy hang on" yeah!

It wouldn't be hard, in the age of internet, to have a website selling online versions of the entire library. A Spotify for games. But they would rather try to channel people into buying the new thing, and the best way to do that is to get rid of all the old games.

if i remember correctly, there's a phrase in polish that goes "if it's not about something, it's about money". it doesn't make sense for companies to come after rom sites for hosting games they'll never release, and it doesn't make sense for them not to release the games that they don't want people to pirate so bad. the only logical answer is that they don't see the potential profits as enough money, and considering that these companies are already filthy rich, i have very limited sympathy for them.

Emulation is not theft. If a million people have access to the same thing then its not stealing. The game is not gone nor has it gone anywhere.

I have the virtual game stations in the box I sometimes run it on my g3 it works really well to.

That sucked when emuparadise went down. A lot of my burned sega Saturn collection I downloaded off that site

Love emulation. It's a terrific way to play classic games that cost $$$$ or you can't find at all.

I'm a game collector. I own hundreds of games and consoles from the 1970s to today. if it weren't for emulation, i never would've learned about the many awesome games of yesteryear. Not to mention, if i didn't have my classic games, I along with many others, would've turned out to just be serial killers. LOL

Wanna know who loses out if emulation was LEGAL rockstar games army recruitment tool

0:38 I used a ZX spectrum emulator on the Commodore Amiga, I'm sure that came out before this.

If the game in question is NO LONGER obtainable LEGALLY to buy FROM the company who released it then the company shouldn't have the legal right to have a ROM of it pulled from a website. The company should put the game back online for sale / or back out for out for sale on their stores or butt out. However, if you can buy the game legally FROM the company that made it, then NP, it would be fair to honor the removal request. I'm against emulation when you find people emulating say... the Nintendo Switch which is a current gen console. How many people downloaded the latest zelda game before it even released? Lots. Emulating a game which is not even officially released yet or is current gen (available to buy) crosses lines into outright theft and damages. Not to forget the loss to sales of the actual console because people who should have bought the console are emulating it.

I don't own consoles anyone, only PC at the moment. So emulation is the answer for me.

The thing that pains me the most is that i saw a once beloved company (at least by me) go to such effort to combat something we all know wasn't even hirting them in any way. Their greed made me stay away from nintendo products all together. People who emulate games, for the most part, bought those exact games when they came out and would buy them again if they were available for current generations or for pc.