Then we store them and make them available to people so that they can relive the gaming experiences that they used to have as children or as young adults. We archive video games from their original formats and convert them into ROMs. With video games, what we’re trying to do is make sure that that doesn’t happen. A lot of the movies from the 1920s and 30s have been lost because nobody bothered to preserve them. MasJ: We’re a group of video game preservationists. This interview has been edited for clarity & brevity.ĭesmond: What is EmuParadise, and how and why did it come to be? We spoke about the lawsuit’s impact on the future of gaming and game archives, and what this says about public domain. Right after the lawsuits were originally filed, I got to speak with MasJ, the founder of EmuParadise- arguably the most well-known source for retro and classic video game ROMs, and one of my favorite websites from back in the day. If previous-generation games aren’t somehow preserved digitally, their physical forms will deteriorate and eventually become unplayable.

Many reliable, well known ROM websites quickly removed public access to their content to avoid being hit with similar retaliation.īut emulation proponents say that ROM websites can be historical archives. When the lawsuits were originally filed in July, they had a chilling effect on the community that has grown around emulation over the last two decades. All that remains on the websites is an apology letter to Nintendo. Now fast forward ten years: This Monday, November 12th, two popular ROM hosting sites (LoveROMS and LoveRETRO) were ordered to pay $12.23 million in damages to Nintendo for posting copyrighted intellectual property. They were less demanding to run on my janky computer anyway. But, speaking for myself, I didn’t see a lot of harm in emulating older games, like Pokemon Fire Red, or Ocarina of Time. And yeah, I realized at the time that this wasn’t totally legal. Download the right emulators for the consoles you need, pick out some game files (also called ROMs, after the file format) and open them in the emulator software. It’s easy to learn how to use an emulator: Think of it as a software clone of a specific game console. “Wait, I can play video games on my computer for free?” -11-year-old me, probably So when a friend of mine told me about game emulation, it kind of blew my mind.

When I was a kid, I loved video games, but I didn’t have a ton of money to spend on them, nor the consoles required to play.

Super nes emulators emuparadise