GAMING: Nintendo takes on the emulators

By Ronan Jennings

IMAGINE if you had every NES game ever released at your fingertips. Imagine if your phone could store and run those games — thousands of games — from an SD card, or even from internal memory.

The thing is, you don’t need to imagine very hard. That technology, known as emulation, already exists. Your Android phone can store and run pretty much any console or arcade game from the ’90s and earlier. The technology itself is legal. However, the games you download may not be.

Emulation was highlighted once again this week, as Nintendo filed lawsuits against two websites in the US, LoveRETRO and LoveROM, that were hosting read-only memory (ROM) chip copies of NES and SNES videogames.

In short, the websites were hosting Nintendo games for download so people could play them on emulators.

Nintendo likely took action because of their forthcoming online service for Nintendo Switch, which will incorporate some form of classic gaming or streaming of their older games. They are obviously protecting their copyrighted content, which they have every right to do.

However, unlike films or music or even modern games, emulation has always been seen as an enthusiast’s playground, rather than outright piracy. In most cases, older consoles and software simply aren’t making money for their original creators anymore.

Nobody ever complains that Atari, Spectrum, or Commodore games get emulated and shared. If anything, this enthusiasm keeps the brands alive for possible revival.

In addition, it’s legally accepted that people can download ROMs (copies of the game) if they own a commercial copy.

So if you own Super Mario Bros and still have the cartridge, Nintendo may have a tough time prosecuting you for downloading or owning a ROM version.

Things start to get tricky, however, the closer you get to modern gaming. Emulation doesn’t just stop at older games. In fact, for owners of powerful gaming PCs with good graphics cards, you can easily access and emulate not only PlayStation 2 games, but even games for the Wii U, a console only two years ‘dead’.

Perhaps the most famous example of emulation encroaching on a modern game was Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Widely considered the best game of 2017, the emulation of Breath of the Wild for the Wii U was crowdfunded online to the tune of $23,000 per month in order to get the game running (for free) on PCs. The game was successfully emulated within months of release.

It’s very hard to argue that at least some sales of Nintendo hardware and software was lost due to this. As always in debates around piracy, the key lies in accessibility and quality.

Emulation is so accessible that downloading a Super Nintendo emulator and the game of your choice should take less than five minutes, including Google searches.

In addition, emulators offer many advantages over commercial releases, including the ability to save games at any point, online play, graphical upscaling, and more.

If Nintendo really want to compete with ROMs and retro websites, they need to consider the obvious — by emulating the service themselves.

KEYWORDS SNOWED IN

Meanwhile, if you can’t emulate a competitor, just buy them. Irish success story Keywords Studios continues to grow and the company just announced two more acquisitions, one in Japan and another in Canada.

Keywords were once largely focused on localisation (translation) services for the gaming industry, but in recent years have aggressively pursued other services too, including art, engineering, and player support.

The latest acquisitions are Snowed in Studios, a Canadian firm that will strengthen Keywords’ engineering prospects, and Yokozuna Data, a Japanese company that specialises in predictive analytics. Let’s hope they prove key acquisitions.

SILVER-SCREEN GAMES

Jordan Vogt-Roberts will be adding to his own portfolio soon, with the director set to helm a Metal Gear Solid adaptation.

A Metal Gear movie has been a long time coming, but Vogt-Roberts is already thinking about other games he could adapt. He wants to do a ‘quirky’ Zelda that “fuses Ocarina of Time with Link to the Past, with the modern technology of the newer games”.

He’s eager to do a Metroid adaption that emulates the film Drive, where the heroine Samus talks to herself while exploring an abandoned station. Let’s hope Nintendo is listening.