Emulating games is vital to preserving the medium’s history. Publishers and studios continue to show flagrant disregard for their own past,burning down digital storeswhile leaving old games trapped on old hardware. The hobbyists picking up the slack are punished for “piracy”, despite many of the games we emulate being from platforms decades old with no easy way to access anymore. Who are we hurting by downloading the originalSilent Hill 2 ISOother than the publisher’s inflated ego?
Technically, emulation is completely legal.GOG, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo all do it to uphold backward compatibility on newer platforms. The legal issue comes with downloading a console’s BIOS and individual games, but when they’re no longer available digitally or being sold for ridiculous prices by collectors, what’s the solution? That isn’t rhetorical—it’s just a question that no publisher has answered yet beyond ‘Wait and see if we port it’, which is a big if. Legality aside, keeping these sorts of games alive is ethically right. Not every game is going to have the resources to port, and even the ones that do—like Silent Hill—don’t always get that treatment.
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That leaves us in an awkward limbo where the only legal options are to wait and see or fork out on old consoles and games, which if everyone does, will shoot the prices up because physical stock is, by nature, limited. Emulating games from the ‘80s, ‘90s, and even ‘00s doesn’t cause any material harm to publishers and developers, especially since most of them will be bought via third-party sales. They weren’t going to see the profits to begin with. That’s why a lot of people choose emulation, but we’re seeingcompanies like Nintendo crack down on thesein a bid to stop “piracy”. But the solution isn’t to limit how people find your games, it’s to make it easier to use your console than faffing with third-party software and sketchy download sites.
Emulation and the question of piracy are usually framed through the lens of old consoles and games, but we’re seeing emulators catch up like never before. New Nintendo Switch titles can be played on PC at launch, anda PS4 emulator is in the workswhen, not long ago, PS3 emulators felt like a pipedream. We’re running into new ethical ground because it’s not just about whether it’s moral to download games from 30 years ago for free, but whether it’s moral to download games from today. But downloading games today is just as important in preserving the medium’s history as physical media is reduced to an antiquity. Emulation is fast becoming the only way to ensure that we don’t lose huge parts of modern gaming to the whims of publishers who are only focused on the future.
Digital stores are closing down, so we’re relying onremakes and remasters to access the classicson current consoles. But what happens in 20 years when the big three have moved on to new pastures and leave behind this ecosystem and its storefronts?
Emulators are simply getting ahead of the curve. By grabbing games today, we ensure that we have them tomorrow. With this, we can access lost digital media like PT and Nosgoth, stop games removed from storefronts like Deadpool from only being accessible via expensive resales, or circumvent timed digital exclusives like Super Mario 3D All-Stars—which you can only buy on the second-hand physical market now, despite it launching in 2020.
Consoles are pushing more and more into a digital-only future,packaging physical boxes with codes, using discs as a means to start a download, and even having variants without disc drives. Publishers are trying to ease us into a world where you cannot access games through any other means than their storefronts, which is already a reality on PC.
If a PC game disappears from Steam or the Epic Game Store, the only solution is piracy because there aren’t physical copies to buy. They’re gone, saved only by those who repackaged them to download and play illegally. If digital is the future, console gaming’s lost wonders will share the same fate of being preserved only by pirates. But publishers also want to crack down on pirates and emulators, which is another way of saying that publishers are wilfully burying their own history and then throwing anyone who tries to dig it back up in the hole too.
The Nintendo Switch and PS4 emulators might seem like a step forward in pirating the newest games, cutting corners to let people playMetroid DreadandTears of the Kingdomat launch without paying a penny, but that’s just the surface of it. Emulation and piracy have been preserving gaming history for decades in a way that no publisher has, and to chase after them with pitchforks is to pour gasoline onto the Library of Alexandria while billionaire corporations chuck a lit match into the halls. Without emulation and piracy, gaming history will completely fall apart and all those classics you missed out on will be lost to time.
