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It's not just ROMs either. Nintendo once also tried to get old Nintendo Power issues taken off Internet Archive even though they themselves offer no way to view them. Nintendo would rather burn their own history than let people see it for free.
@@one_step_sideways The gigaleak didn't come directly from Nintendo though, at least I don't think so? I thought it came from one of their contractors or something?
It's as if Nintendo is embarrassed by its own history--it rarely ever refers to anything beyond the key franchises. And strangely, the company is extremely reluctant to talk about its development process...especially for the older titles. Imagine all the concept artwork, design documents, and whatnots Nintendo has never shown.
This thought is so often repeated and so obviously false that it's becoming a meme. Nintendo has a vast archive of their data, both physical and electronic, and have preserved far more than their fans could ever imagine. The so-called "giga leaks" are only a sample of what Nintendo has locked away.
Disney ruined the copyright law. It should last for as long as patent do, not a single year longer. Now we live in a dystopia where things only go to public domain after a century. Thanks, disney.
Disney didn't ruin it, our "representatives" did by selling us out like they always do. Disney didn't pledge an oath, the lawmakers did. Never forget that our forgive them.
Yeah, copyright law more or less originally allowed for a "generation" to appreciate something, and then it was supposed to be turned back to the human knowledge / societal / whatever pool. Not that I'm in favor of what Nintendo's doing, but I understand "why" they're doing it. If copyright and trademarks aren't continually enforced, they can basically effectively lapse, like the terms Xerox, Kleenex, or Photoshop effectively turning into common-use words. Nintendo realized at some point if they didn't try to strangle the easily distributed ROMs of their old IPs, they risked them becoming way too much "free public knowledge", and down the line might cause them additional legal problems trying to protect their own stuff. Until they started these online services way back when, one could argue for example the original Super Mario Bros ROM no longer had monetary value; long out of production, widely distributed, etc. Any physical carts still being sold were definitely not sending funds to Nintendo. I'm not a lawyer and not pretending to be one, so I don't really know how that might've affected their ability to maintain "Super Mario Bros" as a trademarked name, but I imagine it could weaken it for sure. Of course, any sane person knows this is way too late. There are tons of people who have these ROMs, and they're easily redistributed. This attack is superficial at this point, they're just making it marginally less convenient, even though most of us who care already have the ROMs we want, or even "complete" collections of more ROMs than we'll ever bother to play. The war is already basically lost, but at least they have fodder if they ever want to take someone to court.
The ESA is the bigger enemy, serving Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony and others in its anti-game crusade. Everyone should contact the organization and hold it accountable.
I am a game dev. our previous studio where we made 2 games at before it shut down due to poor management, abandoned both games that we made for android and IOS, both were taken off due to lack of updates, what preserved it and kept access to them and practically saved our portfolio. APk websites. as basic as that, these 2 games were very important to everyone who was involved with em. game preservation is extremely important. to everyone out there who thinks this is not real. imagine, if those cartridges degrade quicker and there was no emulation or backups, all of those games from 30 years ago would have been forgotten and lost. everything, proof?! look at my abandonware, many games like Nocturne would have been lost to time and no one would have known about it if it wasn't heros like the people managing that site working with the community to restore drivers and get things running on modern hardware. you got no idea how many gems are lost in time due to hardware limitation. my current library of DS is inaccessible to me cause both my DSes are 100% dead and currently got no cash flow to just go and buy a "new" DS. game preservation is important for us and the many generations to come.
So true(!) I had the most fantastic games, yet Android/IOS decided to not support them. Same for apps. Still saved a lot of them ... Got a iphone4s with just Flappy bird 😂
People don't realize how many of the early films were lost to history because of cellulose degradation and copiers being rare, we should be glad it's so easy to dump copy and run software on a emu
Exactly. As both a film historian and avid gamer, things being lost to time is a great sadness. Cast and crew worked hard on those early films and TV, and we have no way of seeing their works. Unless by some miracle (example: Metropolis' full cut being found in an Argentinian library)
I didn’t know that. The only movie I know of that’s lost to time is the original cut (I think?) of Event Horizon. Something about it being stored in a cave in Eastern Europe for some reason, I think?
@@newdivide9882 there's a whole thing surrounding lost media (video games, movies, tv shows) it's facinating to research and dive into. Another common subject lost to time is a healthy collection of early Doctor Who (specifically the first 2 doctors) this was due to the BBC's tape wiping and junking policies without an afterthought to preservation/ rewatching. Tape was expensive in those days, so it was commonplace to do such things.
Nintendo tried making renting games illegal in the 80's. Now, they are renting the games to you directly by NSO. The tables have turned in their favor just as they wanted. If I need server authentication to play my games, I really don't own them. I am slowly turning to modded consoles to really own my games.
I wonder if studios tried making renting movies illegal, too. I know they tried to make the VCR illegal, originally all it was for was just recording things from tv, the idea to create a revenue stream by selling pre-recorded movies (not independently copied from tv by people with VCRs) came later, but I wonder if studios were AGAINST it at first, until they realized they could make money
I have refused to pay a cent for any game that demands I authenticate myself in any form this even more so the case for the lunacy of the always online bs like Blizzard did with diablo III a single player game and when they released it a massive # of ppl couldnt even get to a login screen to even start playing due to their idiotic system STOP GIVING THEM MONEY Contant the devs and tell them flat out you fprefuse to buy their game until it is released with zero DRM shit and any single player game should never demand an inet connection esp j8st to play it I've done that and told them they supply the games properly I am happy to pay for them This is why GOG is my #1 source for any game and I'm joined by millions of others always check there for a game you wants b4 anywhere else since they refuse to include DRM shit
@@konnorj6442Clearly you don't mind developers having all their hard work pirated, thereby making the development of games a risky financial proposition. Why spend many months, day in, day out, developing a game when people just pirate it and deprive them of their financial reward? Which is why many software developers stop doing it. Every time a game is republished for sale or rental, the copyright holders get a small royalty payment. Your rights are no less important than theirs.
Queue Gabe Newell quote: “One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. ...... The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”
Unfortunately, these corpo's will always make the argument that they "can't" provide something better than what pirates provide for free. And then they'll play the sympathy card and try to get you to think that somehow that hurts them.
@@MastaGambit That's the excuse, but you and I both know it's full of garbage. Of course, apparently California judges eat that kind of stuff up when you're wealthy.
@@MastaGambit They *could*, but like he said in the video, their motive is money not preservation. Instead of them having their whole catalog available, Nintendo Online drip-feeding new games to provide "new" value to subscribers every month was likely the most profitable option to them, so they took it I'd bet that to them the distribution of old games flies directly in the face of that business model, hence them being so adamant about taking down as much as possible
It's such a bizarre situation, if you don't want people pirating or illegally reposting your work, and there's enough interest, put it on a digital store and sell it. Like... whut? You earn money doing it, it takes practically 0 effort, and people don't complain about game preservation.
100% agree copyright law is fundamentally broken. It's entirely unreasonable to expect people to pay hundreds of dollars to buy software from decades ago.
@@DaviDeXtA Na. It would be enough that emulation is a protected right for preservation and that the rights holder is required to still sell the software if he wants it to be protected.
Yes, Any entertainment media should enter public domain after 20 years of being released. Especially if no further development is being made on it. Sure, they can keep the artistic rights and patents on characters and maybe even license for excessively profiting off it by some X amount, but a standard consumer should be able to freely access it.
What brings me joy about Nintendo's struggle to rid their roms from the internet is that they will never ever succeed. The deep seas of the internet will ensure they will always fail and thus are only succeeding in hurting their own public image.
The irony is more obscure games are the ones getting erased, while it's Nintendo's flagship titles that are easy to find. They've done a lot of damage for people who don't want go spend 200 importing games on the secondary market.
Streissand effect is very real, always has been and always will be. They may have an iron fist in Japan and US, but the internet is no state that'll kowtow to their hissy fits.
They can try. I have a clean 1:1 backup of every single game released in North America from the NES to N64 and Game Boy to NDS. And I'm not the only one. Data hoarders will preserve video game history. We got you fam.
I have 8bit and 16bit complete libraries of not just nintendo but sega, atari, amiga and pc engine on a USB stick and an ssd, not to mention the n64, ps1 and dreamcast collection I have on ssd too. Start now people, while it's still relatively easy.
@@vi_EviL_iv the problem with lobbyists is that, at their core, they are a good entity. hear me out: do you want someone old enough to be bidens dad to be making ignorant decisions about a sector they know nothing about? lobbyists are what (are supposed to) inform lawmakers about what is and isnt reality. without them, lawmakers are blind. which isnt to say lobbying as we see it happen isnt a huuuge problem. just that the problem is a heck of a lot more complex than "lobbyist bad!" we, citizens and consumers, have an obligation to be lobbyists ourselves and this omission is one part of why corporate lobbying is such a big issue today
What is needed in copyright law is a "use it or lose it" clause. If the owner does not provide an easy way to legally acquire their games, then after X number of years, they become public domain. And "limited times" releases do not reset the timer. Also, if a product of theirs is being pirated and they are not providing a legal way to acquire it, you are not depriving them of revenue. So how can the owners claim $150,000 lost per product when they are not providing it?
I think the idea is that it could compete with their new stuff. I don't have examples but I think a lot of companies do this; purchase the copyright so they can block the release of a competing product or technology.
@@SpaghettiEnterprisesImagine making a product so good that it’s still popular decades into the future, and then deciding to restrict access because it competes with your newer product. Nintendo is being ridiculous
The point that worries me the most is collateral damage. With Nintendo talking down anything they find, they might inevitably make some totally unrelated, obscure games disappear - while their own ROMs are way too popular to be erased from the internet ever again
Could also backfire on them as well. I don't even find Nintendo games to be all that desirable anyways. Need to purchase a console, a subscription to online services, and then the game. I'll stick to my PC and the Steam store
You're right. Most of the games in the entire collection of a videogame console are obscured games with complex and disputable copyright holders. Goldeneye is a good example albeit being a popular game. I'm playing a game named Out Run 2019. It's a futuristic take on a dead series on a dead console from a dead developer by Sega. Good luck finding any digital version of it.
@@Vermilleno And there's still no definitive, publicly visible proof that it even was Nintendo. Garry himself supposedly "can't" publish the actual takedown notice in its entirety, and Nintendo refuses to confirm or deny that they sent one to begin with, or even to _acknowledge the incident at all._ Plus, why _now in 2024?_ They knew about the infringement since the beginning of Gmod, there's no way they didn't, why did they "let it slide" until now specifically? All evidence points to a copyright troll.
Try four... FOUR decades. They'll go after G&W emulation if they feel so inclined one day. "Hey you stop playing that game that's marginally more fun than typing 'boobs' or "304" on a calculator"
Whatever still gonna play with them f*** them the people that worked on the games are probably not even working there no more so why should Nintendo get the money for the the developers work😂😂 after what two three decades
Vimms is a genuine tragedy, one of the few sites altruistic in its file hosting I've never found another site so dedicated to preservation they hosted the manuals, for these games and different revisions alongside them. They really cared, the website was super safe, there were no ads. It's fucking heartbreaking.
Vimm's is still there, just so you know - poking through the commentary, apparently it's just certain high profile games that were takedown ordered. Actually makes me wonder if it wasn't a copyright troll... or an automated system. The site definitely still exists though!
There is no "was" about this; Vimm is still up. People need to stop being so fucking dramatic, talking about it like it got sued off the internet like megaupload or something. 🙄 It was only a very small handful of mainline Mario, Zelda, Metroid ROMs. Now, yes, this is morally wrong. But stop acting like we need to sing Vimm's swan-song or something, it's still up.
Vimm's Lair was in my opinion the OG for classics preservation. Over the years, they had helped archive a vast majority of the classics, as well as more obscure titles. Many of which I personally haven't heard of before, both foreign market as well as domestic. To my knowledge, not once has VL ever asked for money or any sort of compensation, to that I sincerely thank them for their commitment to providing an archive for the sake of preservation. They have always promoted gaming on the original systems themselves, as well as obtaining them for the best possible and truest form of the original gaming experience.
Vimm's Lair was an amazing site and the people that created should be lauded for their genuine passion, care and dedication to video game preservation. As you pointed out, not once have they asked for a single coin from me, and I have downloaded an awful lot over the years to build up my retro collection. This has been beneficial for A - playing those games I missed out on from my youth due to insufficient funds or because I had the 'other' console, i.e. NES then Megadrive/Genesis, anb B - I've been able to showcase my gaming history to my now teenage lad who will quite contentedly eschew an online game for a qood quality story driven single player game. As a long time gamer, I've only downloaded ROMs upto and including Wii. For my Switch, I own easily 150+ games with a relative even split of physical and eshop purchase. I can hand on heart say that not a single one of those has been bought second hand or downloaded illegally. I have suitably lined Nintendo's pockets, and will no doubt continue to do so into their next generation. If they are to go about their draconian ways against the ROM scene, where no one seems to be benefiting financially, then why not target second hand sales where the seller does gain a financial uplift to their back pocket. Obviously, I would hate for this happen too, but in these strange strange worlds, you just never know.
Forreal, super bummed to see that they’re the latest to fall victim to Nintendo’s crazy litigiousness. Vimm’s got a blog on their site that he’s contributed to for almost 20 years, was super cool reading through some of the history there, and makes it even more sad that the site has been almost entirely taken down now.
I was just on VL today downloading games…. I saw a couple of weeks ago none of the Pokémon games for GBA were available for download. I checked recently and was able to get the ones I wanted. So not sure where everyone is seeing you can’t use the site anymore. 🤷🏻♂️
Also they have the more working Roms, like I have this DS loader on my 3Ds and I heard you can still get mystery gift on Gen 5 Pokémon with a specific DNS for the WiFi. I tried on the one I had but it didn’t work, looked it up and heard that Vimm’s lair roms would work and it did 👍
Games as a service is a scam, you'd have to be stupid to exchange ownership of your games for "convenience" as a paid monthly service. People should be able to purchase a official Emulator & Roms, not be required to authenticate, and be able to play anywhere at anytime. This was my frustration at Nintendo Switch's N64 emu, this is only the beginning of the "fight" for ownership.
Bruh i literally saw someone in another comment thread here argue in favor of nintendo destroying their history with the excuse of "its their games they can do what they want". I'm not sure if they were just trolling, but someone being THAT much of a bootlicker that they no longer value the games that got them to bootlick in the first place is crazy.
@@jabrondestoroyah How the hell does politics have anything to do with this? I absolutely hate people like you who turn their stupid political views into their entire personality. We get it. You watch the news and listen to your favorite talking heads. Who cares. Also I'm a republican and have been pirating shit since the mid 90s. What you know about duping VHS tapes from Blockbuster?
And when their rereleases are as lazy as “Super Mario 3D All Stars”, a collection that isn’t even complete, it just pushes even more people towards emulation!
@@sk00ks41To be fair that collection is the best way to play Super Mario Sunshine, a fantastic underrated game in my opinion. I agree that they could have made Mario 64 at the very least widescreen though.
And that’s the thing: Nintendo is less a “VIDEO GAME Company” and more a “Video Game COMPANY”. They wield so much brand power that as a corporation, they strive for as much profit from such brand appeal as possible. “If you love our stuff, buy buy buy!”
Gabe Newell once said "Piracy is a service problem" meaning that most people pirate because they don't have access (or difficult access) to the product/service they want. They would gladly pay for it, but they can't, or can't be hassled to.
Regional pricing is huge too. People in low income countries can’t afford $60 for a game. Although tbh Steam has regional pricing and even cheap indie games on that platform are pirated.
Many people have said that, and not even in the video game industry. The main source of piracy is a lack of convenient access to the public, not people who just wanna steal things.
True. You can't buy what you can't afford. They don't lose money. A digital copy costs them nothing. They don't even sell the systems anymore. But I guarantee if they put an emulator/roms collection on Steam for their outdated games library I'd buy it. Most would. They are only losing money on it because they won't do it themselves.
@@Stuff_And_Things I would certainly buy an official emulator with their full catalog of roms on PC if they ever released it for a fair price. They're spending tons of money on lawyers and just leaving money on the table, the market is there, they're just too blind to see it
I personally think games should become public domain after 20 years. No company sells new versions of those games. It's not like books where even after 100 years people buy new copies of some books and the inheritence can still earn money of it. Sure the IP will still be protected but that particular version should be freely available. Sure Nintendo doesn't want this or people might not buy the newer versions of their products.
'The ip will still be protected' is exactly why nintendo, and others, do this shit. If you do not protect your trademark, *if you do not enforce your ckaim on a trademark*, you lose it.
So, they say we do not own anything and we are renting a license. So, make them comply with this and when cartridges fail, then they have to provide replacements as we are only in possession of the license and not the product. If they want to claim copyright ownership of the games for the life of the creator plus 70 years, then when stuff fails then have to provide replacement options. The sword cuts both ways.
Well, it can be argued that it's your responsibility to keep the provided data intact. On the other hand, that's exactly why the private copy right exists, so you can make sure you always have a backup in case. I do believe it needs to be illegalized for companies to make it so difficult if not impossible to to back up your legally purchased software, so I partially agree with your stance
there’s also the normal human answer of “Stop being dicks and let us preserve art/history” it’s not like anyone is buying a new copy of F Zero, get real lol
It's not a rumor at all, tbh. It's blatant fact. They openly brag about doing it on social media, it's like they think they'll get a personal thank you note from Doug Bowser or something.
To them, it’s not just their current profits they’re protecting when they use this Disneyesque vault strategy, but the potential of future profits. To them, the ability to whip out an older game and turn a profit if they should feel the need to fall back on that in the future is itself worth the effort to rigidly prevent anyone else from providing an actually reasonable alternative today. It’s worth noting that they benefit from scalpers in a way that they don’t from emulation because emulation breaks through their tightly controlled vault strategy to offer free, versatile and high-quality access to the masses, while scalpers help keep the prices of their games high as well as increasing scarcity both through those exorbitant prices and by keeping games inaccessible (and making them even scarcer every time someone buys one). Little wonder they hardly touch scalpers but go after emulation vehemently.
This is true in a lot of corporate spaces. They'll hire someone to audit the business for time theft and pay them far more than what the auditor can recover, for example. It's not about the expense, it's about the show of power.
Plot Twist: Nintendo downloaded all the roms from the internet, because they had no copy of their own games anymore to install on their NES mini and SNES mini.
As someone from a country where certain games and consoles never arrived here in the '90s, emulation is giving me the chance to play games I could only see on the pages of gaming magazines of that time and dream of playing them. I say all power to emulation and *_true_* video game preservation.
These attempts to remove rom sites just encourages more people to download roms. The Fear of Missing Out is a real thing, and people will mass download roms as quickly as they can to preserve it from future shutdowns.
Not to mention most of these roms are exceptionally small. Someone could spin up a new Google account with 15GB of free storage in 5 mins and upload the whole SNES library. It'd be an endless game of wack a mole.
They will always be available somewhere on the internet..nintendo cant stop for instance russians from hosting it etc, so many countries where nintendo have no power. Not to mention torrents
Internet Archive lost a major copyright lawsuit for millions of dollars just last year. They are attempting to appeal the decision but if they lose (and they likely will) then they will almost certainly have to close down rather than pay 19 million dollars.
Internet Archive also have changed their access to archived books to become "loaned" instead of allowing a download. Pretty soon all of their content will become more and more restrictive.
@@user-nu8in3ey8c It was always for loaning. They did a bold move to allow downloads during the pandemic. Unfortunately that decision is haunting them to this day
For the last 14 years or so, Nintendo has incorrectly stated that pirating games they don't sell anymore has somehow cost them profits. Honestly, I wish it actually did. They've adopted this position of hating their old works. This position of hating the games that made them what they are today, and it's shameful.
@@ATWAbsurdI'd bet you 1000$ the game designers at Nintendo don't truly believe in the equivalence of the experience. It's all dumb posturing, and the real fallout is the people trying to celebrate the culture.
They also routinely call emulation illegal even though they know, for full fact, it isn't. They know that they have fans that will hang on their every word and repeat it verbatim.
@@riseoflugia the r/roms megathread exists, mostly as a collection of links to the internet archive to make things easier to find. Although if you want anything of Nintendo's older than Gamecube, you'll have to navigate through the romsets under misc. Why all the older individual stuff was taken down is beyond me. Edit: Never mind, it got moved over to the retro section.
Internet archive also keeps movies alive. Love that there is a site where art does not die. Importing old games is a pain for old consoles. I lost alot of my hardware/library due to fire. Still makes me sad.
There are torrents containing every single game from all of Nintendo's pre-Gamecube consoles. They're not even that big, in MB terms. Most of them have thousands of seeds. That genie isn't going back into its bottle.
I think that what pickles my cucumber most about this is the fact that by erasing gaming history, these companies are also deleting evidence of the standards to which they used to develop games.
The standards haven't meant a thing for years Idiots are all to happy to buy microtransactions Deluxe editions Pre order games despite a track record of broken games on day 1 Some... The majority I should say are all too happy to keep buying any slop thrown in their face and keep repeating that cycle
@@lukemorgan6166 It all started with horse armor and things went downhill from there..... It was bound to happen, any industry with any revenue potential will be chewed up by aggressive capitalists, the experimental age of gaming hasn't existed in the AA and AAA landscape for over one and a half decade, or one could argue longer, personally I think it ended with sixth gen and began with 7th with day one patches and no care for the state of games when going gold.
Don't want the iPad kids to wake up once they hit sentience, then the companies wouldn't get the pump and dump money from every Millennial-fied properties
My thoughts: If the copyright owner provides no method to access the content, then a clock starts. That clock counts down 2 years. At the end of that time, if the owner has not provided a means of access, then their copyright is rescinded.
@@slipperynickels not quite "fair" having a timer ensures that they've had time to offer an alternative method to their fans. I'd argue all games on every device become fair game immediately after the devices EOS accompanied by rights to emulate starting upon announcement of their next product line. The only crime should be charging for IP's that aren't yours whether the public or the big companies themselves.
Nintendo could EASILY host their own Vimm's Lair as you said. And simply charge like $5 for old rom's they'd otherwise not release physically. This would make the retro community happy and they'd make bank on the downloads.. sooo friggin simple!
If Nintendo aren't selling the ROMs, then copying them is not causing any loss, financial or material. Copying them deprives nobody, except rip-off eBay re-sellers.
@@kenrickman6697why are you talking about games as if they were heroin Nintendo isnt a publicly traded company, they dont have shareholders, and on top of that they are raking money in hand over fist with the switch because of its incredibly low cost of manufacture and high retail margin.
@@Vanity0666Nintendo's ticker is OTCMKTS: NTDOY, they're publicly traded on Japanese markets. No clue where you got the idea they're not, people only know about their sales and production costs through shareholder meetings and public financials. Private companies don't release that stuff.
"Game companies HATE game preservation. They don't want you to preserve their old stuff. They want you to forget their old stuff and buy their new stuff." - RGE, Raging Golden Eagle
Nintendo knows this they are just flexing their corporate muscle & then they will do this but I’m not buying the OG Super Mario bros anymore in my life time…
The irony in Daddy Gaben's commentary is real. Steam's horrid service requires "owners" to ask permission to play their games once every two months. People who would rather truly own their games can only really buy games on GOG, and they're simply not all available on GOG, so there's only one option left.
@Throefly Nah, stream is by far the best and most popular and is the only answer to the piracy problem. People are happy to buy games for cheap from steam, and if bimonthly internet checks are all that are required to kill piracy then this is an amazing thing.
@@joemamr710 What about Denuvo DRM ? What about requiring other launchers, and accounts on those services to run your games ? What Gabe said, would have been pushing it, 10 years ago. But today, Gabe isn't providing that same service he said, those few years ago. Today, it's now getting really hard to buy a AAA game from Steam, that then REQUIRES a 3rd-party launcher, and an account, to run a game you purchased on Steam. What "Service" is this, now ? You just as well get the same game directly from the original dev, so you then only need their launcher, and account.
Eventually, the people who love these games won't be around anymore. Without emulation and ROMs, the earliest games will be like old BBC videotapes: many lost to history, never to be seen again.
They will sit on it and not even get up to use the toilet. Yes, this means that they will just poop all over their IP. They are dumb if they don't want to invest in means of profiting off of their existing IP. Find a legal means of providing distribution to fill the vacuum made after going after pirate websites. If they are going after sites using DMCA, why not look to the music industry as a success and legitimize distribution of ROMs other than on some store that will shut down and the players lose access to games they paid to play?
Without the ROMS available online, I would not have been attached to Mario, Zelda, Metroid, etc. And I wouldn't have a nintendo Switch and 3DS I live in a nation (Lebanon) where Nintendo isn’t popular ( playstation is the most popular). So finding old nintendo console and games is almost impossible. So I tried retro through roms and emulators starting from 2015, and I fell in love with Zelda and other gaming franchises, and that made me want to buy the switch and 3DS.
My issue with the idea of them being illegal roms. Is the part where Nintendo is trying to also destroy the abandonware that they have no rights too. Therefore the idea that its just about protecting copyright is false. Especailly since Nintendo does nothing to save the abandonware that they try to have destroyed.
What about when some one gets introduced to a franchise, starts going through it and decided to play new releases becasue of it? Also why not find a way to include those older titles at a rebate and add features. Like so many people play Pokemon randomizers or nuzlocke, or Zelda randomizers, those could very easily just be features in actual releases of the game. Put it on the shop for like a dlc pack for pokemon, or a stand alone randomizer for like 10 bucks. People would buy it, and it would require very little work to put out there too.
Im a big Gmod fan, and Nintendo recently took down an absurd amount of addons destroying decades of work and history for having any trace of Nintendo properties. It's true that these included asset rips, (which are frankly already nothing to be upset about, if technically not legal) , but many *many* more were totally original code and content simply inspired by Nintendo properties, frequently created completely from scratch and were artistically distinct from anything Nintendo ever sold. One of these addons, the map used in the "Team Fabulous 2" animation from 2012 by kitty0706 (Colin Wyckoff), was the last straw for me. Colin was a beloved Gmod machinima animator and passed away in early 2015 after a long struggle with leukemia. This map, which was nothing more than a parody of a mario kart map- built from scratch and laden with memes, ostensibly fanart- had become one of many little memorials to Colin and his work over the years. This map has been taken down numerous times since this started, despite everyone's best efforts. Nobody seems to be able to keep it up no matter how quiet they are about it or how overt their intentions are with it's preservation. As someone who grew up with an N64, and whos life was shaped by works by Nintendo, I was always annoyed and baffled with Nintendo's apparent hatred of their own work. Something about this most recent episode with the Gmod community broke something for me though. They're destroying other people's history too, in some cases deeply sentimental work. It's disgusting, I cannot abide this anymore, personally. When you release art into the world, on some level you are relinquishing some control of it. It becomes part of culture, and on some level something that belongs to everyone. Copyright law has broken how we think of stories and what they actually are. I have nothing but absolute contempt for this company and the people in charge of it at this point, as well as any other entities that operate like them, and anyone who is an apologist for their actions. I wholeheartedly support preservationists whether their efforts fall under legality or not. Our culture belongs to us.
Legitimate question, why? From a creators perspective, why should they forfeit the right destroy their creation? (Note: I don’t mean that which has been distributed already.)
@@Leaky_Spigot I actually agree with you on this. It is their right to want to erase it. Thats kind of the problem though. There are groups of people that believe art belongs to the consumer once it reaches a certain level. I think it just depends on personal affliction
@@eeyoretriple6 Fair enough. Both are fair perspectives. I’m of the mindset that once you make something public, you give up certain rights to it. Erasure being one of them. If you’re able to convince everyone to agree to its erasure, go for it, but exclusive control over that aspect has been forfeited.
For some games its valid to take them down Like Devil May Cry 1-3 on PS2/3 for example it makes no sense to allow that given you can buy it off of steam. But Nintendo games almost ubiquitously are terrible about preservation and the only thing stopping them is U.S law protections standing in there way and saying no otherwise they would exorcise full reign on the Internet Archive and other such places like emulators. I understand the piracy argument but I also know Nintendo outright abuse the heck out of that argument to be extremely controlling of there IPs to a unhealthy draconian degree. I feel its only piracy if the company is actively selling the game in a means of permanent ownership elsewhere. If there not then in my eyes its not piracy because the company isnt able to make money off the game no matter what you do anyways at that point. While it is there IP there really needs to be a law that forces Copyright exemption if a game is left inactive for to long that should imo only apply if there under permanent purchase constraints not a subscription if were gonna have copyright be this absurdly long. I am fine with a sub service but I would like a permanent means to buy the game if given the option without being punished for seeking out a game there not even selling.
I've been going to Vimm's since the 90's. That was the best Rom site ever. Hope they don't get sued into oblivion or anything. I'm surprised they've dodged Nintendo's wrath for the longest time.
The thing of note here is that it was *Tiktok creators* that put Vimm on the ESA's radar. That website, and the clones it inspired, are not just menaces, but *damn menaces.*
@@Code7Unltd Well, then! In that case, I'm in *FULL SUPPORT* of the U.S. federal government outright *BANNING* TikTok! If a federal TikTok ban can put a stop to these snitches, then go ahead and ban TikTok in America!
@@Code7Unltddoubtful. This is just conspiracy theorizing. And I'm in my 40s, so I have just as much incentive to dislike the thing that all the kids are using.
I'll never understand WHY these huge game companies don't go the route of the music industry. If they made free emulators, and sold each classic rom, drm free, for like .99 cents, they'll make a killing.
Because, if you do that, you would need to host those ROMs. You would also need to produce them...and we know that Nintendo lacks the actual copies to produce ROMs. And the biggest point against it: How could they be selling Remake after Remake for 60 bucks, if the original was available for 99 cents?
@@neros_soren You REALLY hit the nail on the head here. They dont care about the old versions, they just dont want you to play them because of the "remake culture" that the industry seems stagnated in. Sure, some remakes are great, i.e. Windwaker HD, RE2, etc... but then there's low effort BS and no QoL emulation based remasters that people are able to play much better on their own PCs with fan-made emulation programs. Shit really grinds my gears... 😕
Yeah. Apple's iTunes is the reason we know that an official Nintendo ROM site would make money. Back then, people puzzled over how anyone would be able to sell digital music when piracy through file-sharing existed. Apple gambled that people would be happy to pay to get single tracks _a la_ file sharing if they could do it legally and reliably. They succeeded wildly.
This is such an old and completely incorrect understanding of the state of the music industry. Piracy killed the music business and artists make less than they ever have. Subscription model music services only exist at such a low cost because it was the only way to claw back any revenue from “music fans”. Game Pass is the same looming disaster
When companies became mostly shareholder owned, the ones in charge stopped caring about the history of the company. Pride in the company no longer counts; it's all about return on investments. In my previous job I visited companies daily and often in family owned ones you'd find a small museum showcasing their products from their past. There is a pride in the history. Companies who got bought out or were shareholder owned already, never bothered with that "sentimental" stuff. It's a shame. Especially for the entertainment industry since those products touched the lives of many and always meant something special.
Curse you for this completely demoralizing comment. I can't imagine a more unaccommodating use of your time. You should be very, VERY ashamed of yourself.
Always remember that Nintendo tried to ban the rental of games in their ridiculous belief that the entire world is Japan, and now they only rent these old games on garbage emulators, if you refuse to sell it to me (sell, not rent), I'm off to the high seas, screw you
@Swampert384 pretty sure they're referring to the subscription based retro games available on the switch. And how Nintendo shut down their eshops on the Wii/WiiU/3DS.
And also xbox and playstation, but those are your daily drivers so you look the other way. Xbox literally just had a conference where they basically said good bye to discs, and hello to Stadia 2.0. Let me guess, you're not bothered by that?
I've noticed a pattern: everytime nintendo releases a new product they go after rom sites. This happened when they released the mini consoles and now is constantly happening probably caused by a new legal police inside the company to avoid competition to their NSO app.
I still remember Nintendo DMCA'd some old Flash Mario Level Maker because they were going to release Super Mario Maker on the Wii U. Also they've DMCA'd 'Another Metroid 2 Remake' (AM2R) because they were planning on releasing Metroid: Samus Returns on the 3DS. Not related to Nintendo, but Square Enix DMCA'd the English fan-translation project of Final Fantasy Type-0 for the PSP because they were developing FF Type-0 HD for the PS4, which ended up getting localized in English for the first time.
Could be to protect it's IP from genericization and to prevent their copyright being void if it needs to remove anything. However I would appreciate if Nintendo would issue licenses to certain fan projects that it approves of.
I've always wondered how many dev teams when bringing their classic titles back, just downloaded their ROM from one of these sites and then took "heavy inspiration" from existing open source emulators in packaging up their title for re-release. I feel like community preservation is what makes their commercial re-release even possible.
I remember reading that some ot the Nintendo eshop ROMs were found to have headers added by romsites, so they literally were downloading them from rom sites then uploading them to the eshop.
@@DrewPicklesTheDark I can imagine a scenario where prior to sending out the first wave of mass "cease and desist" letters, some junior Nintendo employee is tasked with downloading a full romset first to get the record keeping house in order.
What outrages me is just how often big companies like Nintendo just steal other people's work themselves. Such as ripping off a composer who never licensed their music for reproduction (the "you wouldn't steal a car" anti piracy ad). Or just stealing open source software that requires credit or source code to license. They enforce their copyright to their fullest ability but show no respect to the copyright of others. Frankly I don't recognize the moral legitimacy of how a lot of companies enforce their copyrights. I don't care what the law says. Laws often don't reflect morality or societies interests. I don't believe companies like Nintendo do rightly own their IPs to the point of having the right to destroy them for the entirety of society. Once you publish a work that reaches a certain point in the culture, like for example Mario or star wars or something like that. I don't recognize that the owner has the right to exercise total control anymore. Laws ought to serve society, not the other way around. And society and it's culture is not served by a monopoly group exercising existential level control over a work. Copyright should encourage adding to the culture of a society, not protect destroying it. It should encourage creativity, not discourage it.
They have gone as far as to target SHEET MUSIC in the last month. IF YOU BUY ANYTHING NINTENDO YOU SUPPORT THAT. SPEAK WITH YOUR WALLET, NO MORE NINTENDO UNTIL THE AGGRESSION STOPS.
The core issue is our current copyright law. I find it completely insane that we have 100 year plus copyrights. The original intention of Copyright (USa) was to give the creators a limited window of time to monetize their creations. The corporations have, Disney in particular (who built there empire partly on the Public Domain), who have turned it into a cash cow for themselves. We need two separate copyright laws, one for individual people thatvallows them to benifet for ther lifeime from there creations and limited one for corporations that makes them make available tfor sale or rental their copyrighted works. If they fail for two years to do so the work should be considered abandoned and immediately fall into the public domain.
yea if look at history can see someone on other side world no contact would come up with same or very simmilar idea, its like these ideas come from the ether or something and they KNOW THIS, detetice conanan is a diffrent copyright in usa as vs japan for example.
Copyrights should last only 4-5 years anymore than that stifles innovation , if said product cant make decent profits in that time period it is a poor product.
I'm not opposed to your solution on a macro level but I think you're missing some of the picture. Many individual creators who sell their work also establish corporations for tax and and other business reasons. This is often done even if the the creator in question is the only payrolled employee at the corporation.
I second this. Companies should not be allowed to just let their IP's rot in a vault for decades while also claiming that emulating them is causing them to lose profits. You can't lose money on properties you haven't sold since the 90's. I think it's pretty reasonable that if a work has been made inaccessible 10 years after its release (as in it can no longer be purchased directly or rented through subscription services), it should be considered an abandoned work and be added to public domain. Not only would that encourage companies to actually preserve their history, but also encourage the continuation of series that would otherwise be forgotten
@Egalitarian917: That would kill almost all non-service software development. Almost literally everything would move to SaS, and you would own even less.
It was the romhack translation of Seiken Densetsu 3 that made the team at Square think that they should localise the Collection of Mana for the Switch.
Right? Publishing Live A Live to the US would have been a rather stupid plan if there wasn't the bomb ass translation patch for it and a grassroots community who loved the game thanks to that patch.
Whats funny is that the version of Trials of Mana on collection is a snes rom running on an emulator. It was dumped and now I am playing it on my own actual super famicom.
If I recall the team behind translating Final Fantasy Type 0 had the same issue. Their translation completed at the same time the game was announced for PS4
I would say that you’re absolutely right. We need website across the world that are offering these downloadable games and Ron Phorm that don’t actually work with subpoenas similar to the pirate bay so that all they do is offer connections to different people with it on their computer and it’s hard to take them down so if I were a gaming company or an emulation company, I would definitely definitely, be looking to create the system that connects Byron cellar that way you’re not having to do XYZ because there are certain games that I like and then there are certain games that I dislike and the fact that I have to go back and buy that crap through system and then buy a license to use it. What happens if the license goes corrupt or something, that means that I can no longer get my game and no longer play my game because it’s off-limits now so basically I paid for something for nothing and that bothers me so having emulation is reasonable
It all matters where the site is being hosted at. If its within Nintendos jurisdiction then it isnt safe. Also, dont store your roms on any cloud services including Google Drive because the have rights to have their IP removed from there too. Store them on hard drives.
Japan has a law against unauthorized mods. It's not just Nintendo, it's a few bad actors in Japan with an ironclad grip upon Japan and the international community.
Yeah he made like 90k selling them, selling them. Everyone knows selling and making money off of that is a yuge nono. Dont hack things and then sell them.
I would like to add another point of view besides what you spoke in the video. Growing up in a third world country, roms and piracy were my pathway to acessing a world I could never dream via legal ways. Learning english, acessing culture, information, entertainment, etc. I owe my life to hackers, rippers, modders, translaters, pirates, etc. To me, copyright law as it is serves very well one purpose: keeping poor people poor and rich people rich.
Welcome to PRICE FIXING naka region codes on DVDs bkursys amd in more recent yrs trying to do much the same with games Its blatantly illegal in most countries but they get away with it due to fuktards likenthe MPAA lobbyists and the fact that media like the dvds etc have a region code function in them which wasnt originally intended as a lock but as a feature to help with language and subs etc but they corrupted it and use such as a methodnofnprice fixing and the MPAA has major swing with the governing bodies for dvd bluray hdmi etc which they use for this They try to force player makers to lock the drives/players to X region when they can either leave them unspecd or as region 0 and they will play ALL discs period that way which the MPAA etc tried to stop players like that from being imported esp to NA and western EU ie their cash cows A classic example wss a movie on dvd cant remember what one but it was a massive hit at the time sold in the US for $40 and in germany for 45E iirc and in india it was sold AT A PROFIT for a whopping $2.50 -but if you used a region locked player in the US etc and say a friend from India came to visit and brought the movie foR you to watch together it would refuse to play due to that one byte used as a bs lock and then to add to it in the us they tried to use the dmca to prevent ppl from changing that including trying to prohibit perfectly legal roms for other regions from the MFRs
It's a shame I mean the main reason I went to download ROMs for Gamecube, Wii, Dreamcast, Sega Saturn, etc was that the sellers online and in-person charge way too much for the games, I can understand $59.99 which is already expensive enough as it is, but going towards 100+ dollars or worse 1000+ dollars, that's bullshit right there. and I HATE what Nintendo is doing to various ROM sites. nobody wants to pay hundreds upon thousands of dollars for one game alone. Sometimes I think billionaires who only think about money and not others should be put in their place. SO yeah, what Nintendo is doing right now causing a war against ROMs, that's bullshit!
Yeah, for example Saturn collecting is ridicilously expensive minus some of the most common releases. And not a single dime from those second hand sales and purchases go to devs or copyright holders, so the situation is just ridicilous as outside of collecting original releases, in many cases there is very little financial value with those licences as most people wouldn’t never pay any significant amount of money of those old games. It is also the reason why for some platforms, such as PC, abandonware sites can continue operating. There are many games which copyright ownership is unclear as rights have traded hands numerous times and many owners aren’t pursuing those rights, because there is zero commercial value in the license so they just don’t bother with it. Nintendo is by far the biggest hawk in this business.
If it wasn't for ROMs and ROM hacking, I'd probably be an accountant right now. Nothing against accountants, just it's a drastic change from my day job as someone in IT.
I dunno, intro to accounting was one of the worst classes I ever took. Whatever they get paid, it isn't enough. So many numbers and rules, I can't even begin to comprehend.
Nintendo needs to realize that fighting so hard with piracy isn’t going to stop piracy, if you don’t make your games easily available to buy and save! The virtual console had a great library of classic Nintendo games, but it got replaced with a Netflix or Gamepass style subscription service that you don’t get to own those games!
Unfortunately this is a natural progression. You make great games, they sell well, investors need to make money. Your novel games don't have the margins, so you pull a Disney and re-re-release it. It does well, but it's a one-time boost in profits. So you make them only available by subscription. The people willing to pay for it sign up quick. It's a one-time booster in profits. Somewhere there's a board member who's under fire to make more profits, and they don't have a solution - so they're going after the strawman to appease the investors - the "pirates" that are stealing their profit. The board member knows full-well that the people who are pirating aren't going to turn around and subscribe - this is representative of a hail mary (not for the company, but for an individual executive). If you're ever curious what board meetings are like, this is it - and you always see these awful ideas right before reshuffling because it's someone trying a last-ditch effort to save their jobs, not customers. Sometimes companies hire people that actually get it right once the desperate leaders are out... a lot of times they get someone worse. It's a wait and see.
@@Chiberia Yep it’s all about $$$ like always. They want to exploit our love for the old games and monetize us. We cannot own these games anymore. Once the original cartridges are gone it’s gone.
@@Chiberia those investors and especially the board members need to stay away from game development, I don’t want corporate people ruining our video games. Piracy is the symptom from overly monetized video games as a service, instead of preserving games on modern platforms!
my biggest issue with this is that there are still people who rely on piracy due to the country's they live in who wont allow legal ways to buy and play these games. nintendo fighting against these sites that host the roms lessens the access for those people who are forced to resort to piracy just to play them.
This is the most brazen case of punching down in the history of the rom wars. I'm pretty shocked that they went after Vimm's. That site has retained some tools from the late 90s, and is responsible for a bunch of people becoming interested in game preservation, translation, and new creations for older generation consoles. Vimm's is also hardly the most brazen offender to their Draconian policies. It's much more than that. I really think this is going to cause a lot more molehills for them to whack down than if they just left it alone.
It's not, really. There's millions of those sellers on Amazon and they're all Chinese, so Nintendo can't chase them in court, and they change names more often than most people change underwear. By the time Nintendo sends them a C&D they'll have changed their name to some other shit you've never heard of and be selling the same thing. Going after the sellers on Amazon is like attempting the largest most impossible game of whack-a-mole in the world. It's just not realistically possible.
Under the current copyright system, games that my 50 year old father grew up with wouldn't go into the public domain until I'm well into my seventies. Insane.
A lot of these are available to purchase legally, just at ridiculous prices because resellers think games are worth thousands and Nintendo just won’t make another Virtual Console
@@NotAdachiPeople You can always buy it, copy it yourself then try to resell it for the same or even more. Where there is a will there is a way as long as copying tools exist.
@@NotAdachiPeople Agree !!! plus the fact that the old technology is gettign harder to work and nobody really uses CRT screens anymore... it cost nintendo almost 0 dollars to re-release an old console , you can run it off any 2000 tech no problem and that stuff is virtually free a single core AMD 1 gig chip from 2001 could run all the SNES NES AND N64 emulation ... yet nintendo is complaining .. i think companies like taht deserve to go bankrupt. its like selling your computer to a friend then 10 years later when that friend sells it you say hey can i have my games back and can you delete them... people turned to sony by the millions in 1995 and dumped nintendo that mistake cost them billiions of dollars in lost profit and now there worried about roms that lose them 0 dollars and actaully give them free advertising and nintendo brand awareness
@@Rowlesisgay this is symptomatic, because if it was the ideological decision, there'd be no game from the Nintendo system left. Instead, they took down only these games, which they decided, are lost money revenue.
@@richarddukard8989 Give away copies before they take it away from you. Sad to say, hard drive supposedly do not last all that long. Also, file systems can still become corrupted?
@@richarddukard8989 😀It's on an array that can survive 2 simultaneous hard drive crashes, but if you want me to install another array for it's backup, you're going to have to chip in a few bucks. 😂
This video made me highly consider backing up my Nintendo Switch games for archival purposes. Not sure if or how this is possible, but I never really contemplated the value of preserving them until watching this. And you made it painfully apparent how Nintendo doesn't seem to care about the preservation of the games. Great video
It was honestly a bit heartbreaking seeing Nintendo, Sega, and Bandai Namco remove so many of their retro and non-profitable games off these video game preservation sites. They offer no alternatives to obtain/ play these games in the modern world. I am not paying for a digital copy of a game I already possess, and the fact many current systems do not offer backwards compatibility just further pushes the notion that we do not really own any of the games we purchased, wether back then or now. They do not offer current methods of playing games we already purchased so why aren’t we able to persevere these games and actually make use of the currency spent?
Yep this is why in some ways I want the video game industry to be more regulated than it is. The sad reality is governments are largely boomers who barely know what a "Mario" is let alone understand the industry and its practices as a whole. Video games should be viewed the same as buying a vacuum cleaner or any physical product. If I buy it, I own it. Reason I say that is when you buy games they say "buy" or "purchase" which are very specific terms when it comes to defining ownership of a product as a consumer. If I "buy" or "purchase" a vacuum cleaner I OWN that vacuum cleaner. The company that made it can't turn off a switch and stop me from using it and force me to buy a new one. The most they can do is stop selling replacement parts and then I have to buy 3rd party which is the same as buying 3rd party gaming consoles and games -- The company that made the product gets $0.00 from me buying 3rd party parts/hardware/games. If a video game company stops offering a video game for purchase on a video game console they currently provide for purchase then that video game should be legally deemed "okay" to torrent and emulate. Either that or these game companies need to be legally forced to use the terms "rent" and "subscription" and "service" on their store pages for their games. Saying "buy" and "purchase" are not uncertain terms. If I "buy" something I own that thing. It is mine. Same thing if I "purchase" something it is mine.
Game companies, outside a very select few, give no fucks about preservation. Old games don't make them as much much as new ones, especially live service games loaded with MTX.
There should be laws being made that makes every single company obligated to preserve their creations for at least a set amount of years and after that, it all becomes public domain.
Best comment here. Force them to preserve their games, otherwise the roms are legal. Would finally put a stop to Nintendo putting nice games in jeopardy.
@@neros_sorenBut that's something that obviously won't happen, and Nintendo makes it easier to apply a Komani (that is, it forgets about the video game industry and does something else) before accepting that.
Preserve doesn't equal "make available" though. What you're asking for is the current system, where they make a thing, then 40 years go by and it's still theirs just kept in the vault. Same thing used to happen with Disney. Enjoy playing your NES games in 2089.
Copyright law is BULLSHIT. You get 5 years or one year after last production batch that’s *it.* Ask any publisher they’ll tell you 90% of sales happen in the first year. All Nintendo would need was to sell legal ROMs for like, $1 (for older titles) and people would JUMP on that rather than resorting to shady downloads
The original length of copyright law was 14 years + an optional 14 year extension, its wild that even under the original copyright length many older games would be legally inaccessible
Considering that only dates back to 1996 at this point, I'd be ecstatic to get ahold of anything from the 3rd/4th generation of consoles. A shame that lobbying and sacks of money are capable of what we're at now.
that's absolute rubbish, the only thing slightly like that is life + 70 years for authors of books... what would be the point in making any fiction if you only owned it for 14 years
@@DarkShroom 28 years if you submitted the paperwork for an extension. Either way this was written into law in 1790, why do authors need more time now when we have the internet to sell your works on?
as far as i'm concerned if they're not selling it, it's abandonware 🤷♀ i know it's not as simple as that but how can they be mad if they are choosing not to make it available for purchase
@@abaddon1503 Correct, those two Zelda games were the most prominent examples that came to mind for me at least. Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu! and Let's Go, Eevee! the new remakes on Switch sold well which is cool but the original versions should be preserved.
I'd love if protections were made in regards to preservation. Like if the game hasn't been offered through official channels for a reasonable amount of time, then it's open. Well, more reasonable than literally 70 years after the creator's death. It may sound like, "oh, just wait 5 or 10 years and it's free", but when it comes down to it, if you can't buy it, you can't buy it. If you don't sell it, then how much do you care? Again, the alternative can't be just to never let anyone have the games. And no, to that one guy that thinks that "preservation" should just mean locking it up into a seed-vault type deal, where you don't actually even get to see the games, they just exist in a box. Hell, the very minimum of saying, "yes, you can back up your own games, that's 100% legal and they can't stop you, just don't share it". Come on, video games are the biggest medium in the world, yet it's like so many people still don't take it seriously.
That's why the Internet archive exists complying with the dmca exceptions. Personal private archives aren't affected and or start your own museum of orphan works video games. Obscure
One of the problems with preservation is that original storage media -- magnetic discs and cassette tapes, cartridges and CDs and DVDs -- are prone to deterioration. A second problem is that ROM images can also be lost through deletion, file corruption and compatibility issues. Without widespread dissemination of retro games, they are always at grave risk of being lost.
@@adrenalinex4 I had BigBox but stopped using it once I tried Batocera. They update all the emulators, add new emulators for systems I never heard of, especially new fantasy consoles. Set up the buttons...you just add roms. Can't be easier.
Valve has shown with steam that going after pirates doesn't make money, just making it easy to buy and play games does. Nintendo would make MUCH more money if they just embraced ROMs, and sold them themselves.
I’m not involved with emulation anymore, but around 20 years ago I used to be a moderator/admin on a Russian emulation website. I downloaded most of the roms from torrent sites back then or from cryptic Chinese forums. I also had a few arcade-specific collections (like NG full set or CPS-1/2/3 full set) that I regularly updated and uploaded to UG (if you remember that site, you are old) to keep up with MAME releases. MAME was in C back then and I even made a couple of very small contributions to the code. I bet even though high profile sites might go offline, there are thousands of full copies of every rom just being kept on someone’s back up drive.
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Ninjas??? 🥷
I can't even believe they knew what the site was at...and their existence.
@@soundspark is it good at all
It's not just ROMs either. Nintendo once also tried to get old Nintendo Power issues taken off Internet Archive even though they themselves offer no way to view them. Nintendo would rather burn their own history than let people see it for free.
I think they have a couple files in their own archives. There is probably so much more than what the gigaleak has provided.
@@one_step_sideways The gigaleak didn't come directly from Nintendo though, at least I don't think so? I thought it came from one of their contractors or something?
Nintendo hates fans!
It's as if Nintendo is embarrassed by its own history--it rarely ever refers to anything beyond the key franchises. And strangely, the company is extremely reluctant to talk about its development process...especially for the older titles. Imagine all the concept artwork, design documents, and whatnots Nintendo has never shown.
@@Mr.Pacariothat’s old Japanese business for you. Hoard, keep secret, and erase.
I believe people should back up every single Nintendo game in existence. Nintendo doesn’t care about history.
They're called "Nintendo" because the company is about what you're "Not INTENded to DO" with their IPs.
Thankfully they already are backed up. If the Internet continues to exist, roms will too.
@@RemixedVoicePeople with political compass as their profile picture scare me.
I have most, i bet thousands of other do too
This thought is so often repeated and so obviously false that it's becoming a meme. Nintendo has a vast archive of their data, both physical and electronic, and have preserved far more than their fans could ever imagine. The so-called "giga leaks" are only a sample of what Nintendo has locked away.
Disney ruined the copyright law.
It should last for as long as patent do, not a single year longer. Now we live in a dystopia where things only go to public domain after a century. Thanks, disney.
Disney didn't ruin it, our "representatives" did by selling us out like they always do. Disney didn't pledge an oath, the lawmakers did. Never forget that our forgive them.
Indeed. Original copyright in the US was for 14 years, which is actually 3 years shorter than patents. I think we need to go back to that.
@@anon_y_mousse Absolutely. And wow, I thought patents were 15 years, not 17
Yeah, copyright law more or less originally allowed for a "generation" to appreciate something, and then it was supposed to be turned back to the human knowledge / societal / whatever pool. Not that I'm in favor of what Nintendo's doing, but I understand "why" they're doing it. If copyright and trademarks aren't continually enforced, they can basically effectively lapse, like the terms Xerox, Kleenex, or Photoshop effectively turning into common-use words. Nintendo realized at some point if they didn't try to strangle the easily distributed ROMs of their old IPs, they risked them becoming way too much "free public knowledge", and down the line might cause them additional legal problems trying to protect their own stuff. Until they started these online services way back when, one could argue for example the original Super Mario Bros ROM no longer had monetary value; long out of production, widely distributed, etc. Any physical carts still being sold were definitely not sending funds to Nintendo. I'm not a lawyer and not pretending to be one, so I don't really know how that might've affected their ability to maintain "Super Mario Bros" as a trademarked name, but I imagine it could weaken it for sure.
Of course, any sane person knows this is way too late. There are tons of people who have these ROMs, and they're easily redistributed. This attack is superficial at this point, they're just making it marginally less convenient, even though most of us who care already have the ROMs we want, or even "complete" collections of more ROMs than we'll ever bother to play. The war is already basically lost, but at least they have fodder if they ever want to take someone to court.
The ESA is the bigger enemy, serving Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony and others in its anti-game crusade. Everyone should contact the organization and hold it accountable.
I am a game dev.
our previous studio where we made 2 games at before it shut down due to poor management, abandoned both games that we made for android and IOS, both were taken off due to lack of updates, what preserved it and kept access to them and practically saved our portfolio.
APk websites.
as basic as that, these 2 games were very important to everyone who was involved with em.
game preservation is extremely important.
to everyone out there who thinks this is not real.
imagine, if those cartridges degrade quicker and there was no emulation or backups, all of those games from 30 years ago would have been forgotten and lost.
everything, proof?! look at my abandonware, many games like Nocturne would have been lost to time and no one would have known about it if it wasn't heros like the people managing that site working with the community to restore drivers and get things running on modern hardware.
you got no idea how many gems are lost in time due to hardware limitation.
my current library of DS is inaccessible to me cause both my DSes are 100% dead and currently got no cash flow to just go and buy a "new" DS.
game preservation is important for us and the many generations to come.
How did your DSs die??
@@ghfjfghjasdfasdf it is old, the old one was a first generation and the dsi buttons died due to my Kid's sweaty hands.
And the 3DS bad battery and drifty analog
Copy that, thanks.
So true(!) I had the most fantastic games, yet Android/IOS decided to not support them. Same for apps.
Still saved a lot of them ...
Got a iphone4s with just Flappy bird 😂
People don't realize how many of the early films were lost to history because of cellulose degradation and copiers being rare, we should be glad it's so easy to dump copy and run software on a emu
facts
Exactly. As both a film historian and avid gamer, things being lost to time is a great sadness. Cast and crew worked hard on those early films and TV, and we have no way of seeing their works. Unless by some miracle (example: Metropolis' full cut being found in an Argentinian library)
I didn’t know that. The only movie I know of that’s lost to time is the original cut (I think?) of Event Horizon. Something about it being stored in a cave in Eastern Europe for some reason, I think?
@@newdivide9882 there's a whole thing surrounding lost media (video games, movies, tv shows) it's facinating to research and dive into.
Another common subject lost to time is a healthy collection of early Doctor Who (specifically the first 2 doctors) this was due to the BBC's tape wiping and junking policies without an afterthought to preservation/ rewatching. Tape was expensive in those days, so it was commonplace to do such things.
Same for ancient/old literature and art.
Nintendo tried making renting games illegal in the 80's. Now, they are renting the games to you directly by NSO. The tables have turned in their favor just as they wanted.
If I need server authentication to play my games, I really don't own them. I am slowly turning to modded consoles to really own my games.
were entering an age of rom preservation and truly now at war with Nintendo and mega game companies
I wonder if studios tried making renting movies illegal, too. I know they tried to make the VCR illegal, originally all it was for was just recording things from tv, the idea to create a revenue stream by selling pre-recorded movies (not independently copied from tv by people with VCRs) came later, but I wonder if studios were AGAINST it at first, until they realized they could make money
I have refused to pay a cent for any game that demands I authenticate myself in any form this even more so the case for the lunacy of the always online bs like Blizzard did with diablo III a single player game and when they released it a massive # of ppl couldnt even get to a login screen to even start playing due to their idiotic system
STOP GIVING THEM MONEY
Contant the devs and tell them flat out you fprefuse to buy their game until it is released with zero DRM shit and any single player game should never demand an inet connection esp j8st to play it
I've done that and told them they supply the games properly I am happy to pay for them
This is why GOG is my #1 source for any game and I'm joined by millions of others always check there for a game you wants b4 anywhere else since they refuse to include DRM shit
@@konnorj6442Clearly you don't mind developers having all their hard work pirated, thereby making the development of games a risky financial proposition. Why spend many months, day in, day out, developing a game when people just pirate it and deprive them of their financial reward? Which is why many software developers stop doing it. Every time a game is republished for sale or rental, the copyright holders get a small royalty payment. Your rights are no less important than theirs.
@@another3997 This. That's why it's hard to be a dev. The financial investment is so high.
Queue Gabe Newell quote:
“One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. ...... The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”
Unfortunately, these corpo's will always make the argument that they "can't" provide something better than what pirates provide for free. And then they'll play the sympathy card and try to get you to think that somehow that hurts them.
@@MastaGambit That's the excuse, but you and I both know it's full of garbage.
Of course, apparently California judges eat that kind of stuff up when you're wealthy.
@@MastaGambit They *could*, but like he said in the video, their motive is money not preservation. Instead of them having their whole catalog available, Nintendo Online drip-feeding new games to provide "new" value to subscribers every month was likely the most profitable option to them, so they took it
I'd bet that to them the distribution of old games flies directly in the face of that business model, hence them being so adamant about taking down as much as possible
It's such a bizarre situation, if you don't want people pirating or illegally reposting your work, and there's enough interest, put it on a digital store and sell it. Like... whut? You earn money doing it, it takes practically 0 effort, and people don't complain about game preservation.
I know that people love dropping this quote, but be real. Some people just dont want to pay for old stuff.
The problem is that copyright is far too long. 20+ year old games shouldn't be protected, at least to distribute copies of the original.
100% agree copyright law is fundamentally broken. It's entirely unreasonable to expect people to pay hundreds of dollars to buy software from decades ago.
@@DaviDeXtA Na. It would be enough that emulation is a protected right for preservation and that the rights holder is required to still sell the software if he wants it to be protected.
@@iwankazlow2268 That sounds reasonable.
Yes, Any entertainment media should enter public domain after 20 years of being released. Especially if no further development is being made on it. Sure, they can keep the artistic rights and patents on characters and maybe even license for excessively profiting off it by some X amount, but a standard consumer should be able to freely access it.
I had written a paper opposing copyright infringement law and got marked down hard by the professor. I left university and the course because of that.
Knowing Nintendo are removing roms from all over the place makes me want to download them all.
*_Well, duh… 🤣_*
It is called a "romset". Not that you should search for it, or anything.
@@richardhunter9779Never, of course!
I already have, countless times
there are a few places that are completely in-tact but I'll never reveal them lol
What brings me joy about Nintendo's struggle to rid their roms from the internet is that they will never ever succeed. The deep seas of the internet will ensure they will always fail and thus are only succeeding in hurting their own public image.
Exactly Nintendo is the biggest scum bags in history. People should have learned this when they spent so much attacking TH-camrs.
The irony is more obscure games are the ones getting erased, while it's Nintendo's flagship titles that are easy to find. They've done a lot of damage for people who don't want go spend 200 importing games on the secondary market.
Streissand effect is very real, always has been and always will be.
They may have an iron fist in Japan and US, but the internet is no state that'll kowtow to their hissy fits.
There are so many people with a single SSD with everything on it lol.
@@iamjoehill16TB HDD. Take it or leave it
They can try. I have a clean 1:1 backup of every single game released in North America from the NES to N64 and Game Boy to NDS. And I'm not the only one. Data hoarders will preserve video game history. We got you fam.
we'll need people like you very soon
@@Combatarms4234I have the entire NA library on a 1TB HDD. It's not that large brother.
we live and we make more backup copies
Thank you all so much for your efforts!
I have 8bit and 16bit complete libraries of not just nintendo but sega, atari, amiga and pc engine on a USB stick and an ssd, not to mention the n64, ps1 and dreamcast collection I have on ssd too.
Start now people, while it's still relatively easy.
This is a perfect example of how ridiculous and unbalanced in the favour of Big Business we have allowed the law to become.
It is because of the lobbyists.
@@vi_EviL_iv the problem with lobbyists is that, at their core, they are a good entity. hear me out: do you want someone old enough to be bidens dad to be making ignorant decisions about a sector they know nothing about? lobbyists are what (are supposed to) inform lawmakers about what is and isnt reality. without them, lawmakers are blind.
which isnt to say lobbying as we see it happen isnt a huuuge problem. just that the problem is a heck of a lot more complex than "lobbyist bad!"
we, citizens and consumers, have an obligation to be lobbyists ourselves and this omission is one part of why corporate lobbying is such a big issue today
What is needed in copyright law is a "use it or lose it" clause. If the owner does not provide an easy way to legally acquire their games, then after X number of years, they become public domain. And "limited times" releases do not reset the timer.
Also, if a product of theirs is being pirated and they are not providing a legal way to acquire it, you are not depriving them of revenue. So how can the owners claim $150,000 lost per product when they are not providing it?
Absolutely. This will never, ever happen, but it'd make copyrights much less nasty than they are now.
I think the idea is that it could compete with their new stuff. I don't have examples but I think a lot of companies do this; purchase the copyright so they can block the release of a competing product or technology.
@@SpaghettiEnterprisesImagine making a product so good that it’s still popular decades into the future, and then deciding to restrict access because it competes with your newer product. Nintendo is being ridiculous
@@SpaghettiEnterprises grand theft auto vice City is no longer available on steam because of the remake... Prime example
@@jimsackermanhappens often with music artists. The 20 year old album is missing the month their new album comes out
Maybe that's what happened to the Library of Alexandria, the Romans decided that all those books had breached copyright rules.
and all the romans fanboys said "it's their own property, they can burn whatever they want"
Hilarious comment
@@ViktorKruger99 HAHAHA! That's freaking perfect.
Man I wish the Romans were as greedy as Nintendo
Hahahaha
The point that worries me the most is collateral damage. With Nintendo talking down anything they find, they might inevitably make some totally unrelated, obscure games disappear - while their own ROMs are way too popular to be erased from the internet ever again
Could also backfire on them as well. I don't even find Nintendo games to be all that desirable anyways. Need to purchase a console, a subscription to online services, and then the game. I'll stick to my PC and the Steam store
You're right. Most of the games in the entire collection of a videogame console are obscured games with complex and disputable copyright holders. Goldeneye is a good example albeit being a popular game. I'm playing a game named Out Run 2019. It's a futuristic take on a dead series on a dead console from a dead developer by Sega. Good luck finding any digital version of it.
They already do. Look what happenned to Garry's Mod. 20 years of history is dissapearing.
@@Vermilleno And there's still no definitive, publicly visible proof that it even was Nintendo. Garry himself supposedly "can't" publish the actual takedown notice in its entirety, and Nintendo refuses to confirm or deny that they sent one to begin with, or even to _acknowledge the incident at all._ Plus, why _now in 2024?_ They knew about the infringement since the beginning of Gmod, there's no way they didn't, why did they "let it slide" until now specifically? All evidence points to a copyright troll.
@@Demopans5990they have been going after ROM sites on and off for 25 years. It might backfire but it hasn't so far
I stopped giving them a dime after Wii. I've never seen a company punish its loyal customers so much.
There's a whole group of loyal customers and Nintendo didn't punish them
You're not a customer if you steal their product lmao
@@MattNH1 Not sure where you got that implication, but ok. 👍
@@MattNH1 Thank you!
Nintendo when you download a game that hasn't been in stores for over two decades: "I'm never gonna financially recover from this."
Try four... FOUR decades. They'll go after G&W emulation if they feel so inclined one day. "Hey you stop playing that game that's marginally more fun than typing 'boobs' or "304" on a calculator"
Whatever still gonna play with them f*** them the people that worked on the games are probably not even working there no more so why should Nintendo get the money for the the developers work😂😂 after what two three decades
They were strongly against rentals back then as well.
Good that i have all original Roms in my Shelf ! Just need too save it digital on an virtual disk +back up
Haha right...but wait you can pay us $10 to play a 35 year old game!
Vimms is a genuine tragedy, one of the few sites altruistic in its file hosting I've never found another site so dedicated to preservation they hosted the manuals, for these games and different revisions alongside them. They really cared, the website was super safe, there were no ads. It's fucking heartbreaking.
Those sites should just go online in the "Darknet", anonymously of course. Just set up a hidden tor service and/or i2p web site.
Vimm's is still there, just so you know - poking through the commentary, apparently it's just certain high profile games that were takedown ordered. Actually makes me wonder if it wasn't a copyright troll... or an automated system. The site definitely still exists though!
There is no "was" about this; Vimm is still up. People need to stop being so fucking dramatic, talking about it like it got sued off the internet like megaupload or something. 🙄 It was only a very small handful of mainline Mario, Zelda, Metroid ROMs. Now, yes, this is morally wrong. But stop acting like we need to sing Vimm's swan-song or something, it's still up.
@@MastaGambit I still hate Nintendo though
if you don't remember seeing ads, maybe you had an ad blocker running
Vimm's Lair was in my opinion the OG for classics preservation. Over the years, they had helped archive a vast majority of the classics, as well as more obscure titles. Many of which I personally haven't heard of before, both foreign market as well as domestic. To my knowledge, not once has VL ever asked for money or any sort of compensation, to that I sincerely thank them for their commitment to providing an archive for the sake of preservation. They have always promoted gaming on the original systems themselves, as well as obtaining them for the best possible and truest form of the original gaming experience.
Vimm's Lair was an amazing site and the people that created should be lauded for their genuine passion, care and dedication to video game preservation. As you pointed out, not once have they asked for a single coin from me, and I have downloaded an awful lot over the years to build up my retro collection. This has been beneficial for A - playing those games I missed out on from my youth due to insufficient funds or because I had the 'other' console, i.e. NES then Megadrive/Genesis, anb B - I've been able to showcase my gaming history to my now teenage lad who will quite contentedly eschew an online game for a qood quality story driven single player game. As a long time gamer, I've only downloaded ROMs upto and including Wii. For my Switch, I own easily 150+ games with a relative even split of physical and eshop purchase. I can hand on heart say that not a single one of those has been bought second hand or downloaded illegally. I have suitably lined Nintendo's pockets, and will no doubt continue to do so into their next generation. If they are to go about their draconian ways against the ROM scene, where no one seems to be benefiting financially, then why not target second hand sales where the seller does gain a financial uplift to their back pocket. Obviously, I would hate for this happen too, but in these strange strange worlds, you just never know.
Forreal, super bummed to see that they’re the latest to fall victim to Nintendo’s crazy litigiousness. Vimm’s got a blog on their site that he’s contributed to for almost 20 years, was super cool reading through some of the history there, and makes it even more sad that the site has been almost entirely taken down now.
I was just on VL today downloading games…. I saw a couple of weeks ago none of the Pokémon games for GBA were available for download. I checked recently and was able to get the ones I wanted. So not sure where everyone is seeing you can’t use the site anymore. 🤷🏻♂️
Also they have the more working Roms, like I have this DS loader on my 3Ds and I heard you can still get mystery gift on Gen 5 Pokémon with a specific DNS for the WiFi. I tried on the one I had but it didn’t work, looked it up and heard that Vimm’s lair roms would work and it did 👍
I use myrient now.
Games as a service is a scam, you'd have to be stupid to exchange ownership of your games for "convenience" as a paid monthly service.
People should be able to purchase a official Emulator & Roms, not be required to authenticate, and be able to play anywhere at anytime.
This was my frustration at Nintendo Switch's N64 emu, this is only the beginning of the "fight" for ownership.
Anyone against emulation in general is a bootlicker.
a slimy, corporate bootlicker. couldnt have said it better
Bruh i literally saw someone in another comment thread here argue in favor of nintendo destroying their history with the excuse of "its their games they can do what they want". I'm not sure if they were just trolling, but someone being THAT much of a bootlicker that they no longer value the games that got them to bootlick in the first place is crazy.
@@UBvtuber Just assume they're trolling. People love to engage in arguments online and especially in the gaming community so this isn't anything new.
I'm against emulation of currently supported systems.
@@jabrondestoroyah How the hell does politics have anything to do with this? I absolutely hate people like you who turn their stupid political views into their entire personality. We get it. You watch the news and listen to your favorite talking heads. Who cares.
Also I'm a republican and have been pirating shit since the mid 90s. What you know about duping VHS tapes from Blockbuster?
I'm sure somebody already said this. They want you to pay for everything again and again and again.
And when their rereleases are as lazy as “Super Mario 3D All Stars”, a collection that isn’t even complete, it just pushes even more people towards emulation!
@@sk00ks41To be fair that collection is the best way to play Super Mario Sunshine, a fantastic underrated game in my opinion. I agree that they could have made Mario 64 at the very least widescreen though.
And not even everything....
Not really, It's not about money, Nintendo waste money on this, it's about control of their properties
And that’s the thing: Nintendo is less a “VIDEO GAME Company” and more a “Video Game COMPANY”. They wield so much brand power that as a corporation, they strive for as much profit from such brand appeal as possible.
“If you love our stuff, buy buy buy!”
Gabe Newell once said "Piracy is a service problem" meaning that most people pirate because they don't have access (or difficult access) to the product/service they want. They would gladly pay for it, but they can't, or can't be hassled to.
Regional pricing is huge too. People in low income countries can’t afford $60 for a game. Although tbh Steam has regional pricing and even cheap indie games on that platform are pirated.
@@modiddymo Piracy is always going to happen, but it's severely diminished overall by providing easy access at a fair price
Edit - fixed a typo
Many people have said that, and not even in the video game industry. The main source of piracy is a lack of convenient access to the public, not people who just wanna steal things.
True. You can't buy what you can't afford. They don't lose money. A digital copy costs them nothing. They don't even sell the systems anymore. But I guarantee if they put an emulator/roms collection on Steam for their outdated games library I'd buy it. Most would. They are only losing money on it because they won't do it themselves.
@@Stuff_And_Things I would certainly buy an official emulator with their full catalog of roms on PC if they ever released it for a fair price. They're spending tons of money on lawyers and just leaving money on the table, the market is there, they're just too blind to see it
I personally think games should become public domain after 20 years. No company sells new versions of those games. It's not like books where even after 100 years people buy new copies of some books and the inheritence can still earn money of it. Sure the IP will still be protected but that particular version should be freely available. Sure Nintendo doesn't want this or people might not buy the newer versions of their products.
Agreed 20 years is a reasonable period. After that there is FA chance that you're losing any money from someone having a ROM of it.
'The ip will still be protected' is exactly why nintendo, and others, do this shit.
If you do not protect your trademark, *if you do not enforce your ckaim on a trademark*, you lose it.
So, they say we do not own anything and we are renting a license. So, make them comply with this and when cartridges fail, then they have to provide replacements as we are only in possession of the license and not the product. If they want to claim copyright ownership of the games for the life of the creator plus 70 years, then when stuff fails then have to provide replacement options. The sword cuts both ways.
Well, it can be argued that it's your responsibility to keep the provided data intact. On the other hand, that's exactly why the private copy right exists, so you can make sure you always have a backup in case. I do believe it needs to be illegalized for companies to make it so difficult if not impossible to to back up your legally purchased software, so I partially agree with your stance
I would also argue that if we're merely renting a license to use video games, then video games should NEVER be sales-taxed!
there’s also the normal human answer of “Stop being dicks and let us preserve art/history” it’s not like anyone is buying a new copy of F Zero, get real lol
@@jeffzebert4982 In most states, rentals and leases are sales taxed.
@@jeffzebert4982 Don't push too hard on that one, since there are taxes on rentals too. All you'd be doing is changing the name of the tax.
the worst part. its rumored that trolls and fanboys are the ones that report those websites to Nintendo, man these people are the worst
It's not a rumor at all, tbh. It's blatant fact. They openly brag about doing it on social media, it's like they think they'll get a personal thank you note from Doug Bowser or something.
😮 This I did not know.
What's worse is "influencer" youtubers won't stop talking about it and bringing attention to it.
When you want attention:
@@PostNostalgos that inspires people.
I bet Nintendo has spent more "protecting" their old games than they've actually "lost" to previous gens piracy.
anti consumer policy
They're better off spending that money on giving gamers what the emulators aren't giving us for NSO.
Considering they aren't losing any money to ROMs of games they haven't sold for years...
To them, it’s not just their current profits they’re protecting when they use this Disneyesque vault strategy, but the potential of future profits. To them, the ability to whip out an older game and turn a profit if they should feel the need to fall back on that in the future is itself worth the effort to rigidly prevent anyone else from providing an actually reasonable alternative today.
It’s worth noting that they benefit from scalpers in a way that they don’t from emulation because emulation breaks through their tightly controlled vault strategy to offer free, versatile and high-quality access to the masses, while scalpers help keep the prices of their games high as well as increasing scarcity both through those exorbitant prices and by keeping games inaccessible (and making them even scarcer every time someone buys one). Little wonder they hardly touch scalpers but go after emulation vehemently.
This is true in a lot of corporate spaces. They'll hire someone to audit the business for time theft and pay them far more than what the auditor can recover, for example. It's not about the expense, it's about the show of power.
Plot Twist: Nintendo downloaded all the roms from the internet, because they had no copy of their own games anymore to install on their NES mini and SNES mini.
@@rko2016 mfw Nintendo realizes that their fans are more passionate about their games than they are and archive them better.
@@rko2016 Those are just iNES headers, witch makes sense as they hired the creater of iNES to do WiiVC
@@rko2016 Retail carts != source code. Im sure they have at least one copy of SMB1 and NES tetris and stuff.
@@Velocifyer yet in practice that is enough to either reverse engineer it and straight up better than nothing. i already said it's happened often.
@@rko2016 ???
As someone from a country where certain games and consoles never arrived here in the '90s, emulation is giving me the chance to play games I could only see on the pages of gaming magazines of that time and dream of playing them. I say all power to emulation and *_true_* video game preservation.
❤❤❤
(same here!)
These attempts to remove rom sites just encourages more people to download roms. The Fear of Missing Out is a real thing, and people will mass download roms as quickly as they can to preserve it from future shutdowns.
Yeah... when the last one went down, before vimms, it was a clear sign to me that "harvest time" was upon us. No better motivation.
Not to mention most of these roms are exceptionally small. Someone could spin up a new Google account with 15GB of free storage in 5 mins and upload the whole SNES library. It'd be an endless game of wack a mole.
Yip got all nes snes and every other rom out there total of 340gb of games now im sharing it with colleagues at work 😊
They will always be available somewhere on the internet..nintendo cant stop for instance russians from hosting it etc, so many countries where nintendo have no power. Not to mention torrents
This is why I made my steam deck the ultimate Emulator machine. Over 250 games based on roms alone.
There’s a meme of a dev coming coming home and he says sorry kids. There won’t be any dinner tonight. Someone pirated a game i released 20 years ago
😆 based
Nintendo: "Emulation bad!"
Also Nintendo: "Yeah, we're gonna resell this Super Mario Bros. ROM that a community member ripped."
Surf Wisely.
For $99*
Internet Archive lost a major copyright lawsuit for millions of dollars just last year. They are attempting to appeal the decision but if they lose (and they likely will) then they will almost certainly have to close down rather than pay 19 million dollars.
Internet Archive also have changed their access to archived books to become "loaned" instead of allowing a download. Pretty soon all of their content will become more and more restrictive.
@@user-nu8in3ey8c It was always for loaning. They did a bold move to allow downloads during the pandemic. Unfortunately that decision is haunting them to this day
Only a Matter of time the DMCA will change for Internet Archive then sadly they be sued on the same day
Very useful info for retro gamers. Thanks 👍 That place is the last one w a massive collection to my knowledge now that Vimm has taken a lot down
@@user-nu8in3ey8c
What happens to everything labeled "Community Data", then?
For the last 14 years or so, Nintendo has incorrectly stated that pirating games they don't sell anymore has somehow cost them profits. Honestly, I wish it actually did. They've adopted this position of hating their old works. This position of hating the games that made them what they are today, and it's shameful.
I bet part of it is they think if someone can play an old mario or final fantasy for free then they won't try to pay to play a newer title.
@@ATWAbsurdI'd bet you 1000$ the game designers at Nintendo don't truly believe in the equivalence of the experience. It's all dumb posturing, and the real fallout is the people trying to celebrate the culture.
If piracy was actually equivalent to lost sales and actually hurt game companies, I'd be out there downloading from the am to the pm
They also routinely call emulation illegal even though they know, for full fact, it isn't. They know that they have fans that will hang on their every word and repeat it verbatim.
What will cost them would be total boycott of their products, forcing them to go bankrupt. Thus, they would not have money to make frivolous lawsuits.
They hit Vimms Lair and I'm never forgiving them for that. It was my GO TO
I'm so lost without Vimms, idk where to go now
@@riseoflugia the r/roms megathread exists, mostly as a collection of links to the internet archive to make things easier to find. Although if you want anything of Nintendo's older than Gamecube, you'll have to navigate through the romsets under misc. Why all the older individual stuff was taken down is beyond me. Edit: Never mind, it got moved over to the retro section.
@@riseoflugiaI mean there’s a lot of sites that are safe they just have ads but a faster download speed
@@riseoflugiaI’ve been furiously downloading anything I can get ahold of before more companies go for takedowns
vimms is still up no?? How many of the roms were erased?
Internet archive also keeps movies alive. Love that there is a site where art does not die. Importing old games is a pain for old consoles. I lost alot of my hardware/library due to fire. Still makes me sad.
And books.
There are torrents containing every single game from all of Nintendo's pre-Gamecube consoles. They're not even that big, in MB terms. Most of them have thousands of seeds. That genie isn't going back into its bottle.
Where do I find this torrent so I know where not to go ?
the.... game genie?
@@Cronosounds some say the funny hacker number will put you in the right direction
Was just gonna say the same thing. God bless p2p.
No-Intro ROM sets are available on the archive. No need for p2p.
I think that what pickles my cucumber most about this is the fact that by erasing gaming history, these companies are also deleting evidence of the standards to which they used to develop games.
The standards haven't meant a thing for years
Idiots are all to happy to buy microtransactions
Deluxe editions
Pre order games despite a track record of broken games on day 1
Some... The majority I should say are all too happy to keep buying any slop thrown in their face and keep repeating that cycle
@@lukemorgan6166 It all started with horse armor and things went downhill from there.....
It was bound to happen, any industry with any revenue potential will be chewed up by aggressive capitalists, the experimental age of gaming hasn't existed in the AA and AAA landscape for over one and a half decade, or one could argue longer, personally I think it ended with sixth gen and began with 7th with day one patches and no care for the state of games when going gold.
Of course. SO people cannot compare what ungodly low-quality crap is being sold to them today, compared what we USED to get.
Don't want the iPad kids to wake up once they hit sentience, then the companies wouldn't get the pump and dump money from every Millennial-fied properties
😂🤗
My thoughts: If the copyright owner provides no method to access the content, then a clock starts. That clock counts down 2 years. At the end of that time, if the owner has not provided a means of access, then their copyright is rescinded.
the clock should run out when it’s no longer available for sale.
abolish copyright.
@@slipperynickels not quite "fair" having a timer ensures that they've had time to offer an alternative method to their fans. I'd argue all games on every device become fair game immediately after the devices EOS accompanied by rights to emulate starting upon announcement of their next product line. The only crime should be charging for IP's that aren't yours whether the public or the big companies themselves.
Nintendo would just sell them for $9999 a Rom.
@@Slail no
@@legotavi1320why wouldn’t they? They’re technically providing the roms, even though nobody would afford it
Just get the physical games. It's only about $75,000 for the loose NTSC Nintendo Entertainment System's library.
Is that all?
And only $1000 of them are worth anything.
@@joshpool5881 only for high risk of being busted/counterfeit games
Nintendo could EASILY host their own Vimm's Lair as you said. And simply charge like $5 for old rom's they'd otherwise not release physically. This would make the retro community happy and they'd make bank on the downloads.. sooo friggin simple!
100% agree
Not that simple, that would make them money only one time, they want money all the time, it's very different.
I rather have physical media. Im done "buying" things I will never actually own.
No they couldn't. They don't own the rights to every Nintendo game. You wish it were possible, but it's not that easy
@@elude3808how are they making money off old games currently?
If Nintendo aren't selling the ROMs, then copying them is not causing any loss, financial or material. Copying them deprives nobody, except rip-off eBay re-sellers.
If you're playing retro games, then you're not buying new games. They really want to kill the past.
@@kenrickman6697why are you talking about games as if they were heroin
Nintendo isnt a publicly traded company, they dont have shareholders, and on top of that they are raking money in hand over fist with the switch because of its incredibly low cost of manufacture and high retail margin.
@@Vanity0666 Might as well be heroin to some people
@@leandronc new games suck
@@Vanity0666Nintendo's ticker is OTCMKTS: NTDOY, they're publicly traded on Japanese markets. No clue where you got the idea they're not, people only know about their sales and production costs through shareholder meetings and public financials. Private companies don't release that stuff.
"Game companies HATE game preservation. They don't want you to preserve their old stuff. They want you to forget their old stuff and buy their new stuff." - RGE, Raging Golden Eagle
But why? Why would the gaming companies want you to forget their old stuff?
@@stripedrajang3571Because its quality over quantity.
@@finalhearts676, what do you mean? There were more quantities in the past than now.
@@stripedrajang3571 Because modern games are bad and they want to force gamers to buy them. And you will buy them if there is nothing else!
I see.
I think why they're trying to get rid of these old games is so the younger generations don't realize how bad the new games suck in comparison.
EA and the Sims 2 complete collection moment💀
That is the best explanation I've ever seen.
They're not trying to get rid of old games
Gabe Newell nailed it when he said that piracy is a service issue and man was he right. Nintendo is missing out on such a massive opportunity.
Nintendo knows this they are just flexing their corporate muscle & then they will do this but I’m not buying the OG Super Mario bros anymore in my life time…
The irony in Daddy Gaben's commentary is real. Steam's horrid service requires "owners" to ask permission to play their games once every two months.
People who would rather truly own their games can only really buy games on GOG, and they're simply not all available on GOG, so there's only one option left.
@Throefly
Nah, stream is by far the best and most popular and is the only answer to the piracy problem.
People are happy to buy games for cheap from steam, and if bimonthly internet checks are all that are required to kill piracy then this is an amazing thing.
Entitlement is the real problem
@@joemamr710 What about Denuvo DRM ?
What about requiring other launchers, and accounts on those services to run your games ?
What Gabe said, would have been pushing it, 10 years ago. But today, Gabe isn't providing that same service he said, those few years ago. Today, it's now getting really hard to buy a AAA game from Steam, that then REQUIRES a 3rd-party launcher, and an account, to run a game you purchased on Steam. What "Service" is this, now ? You just as well get the same game directly from the original dev, so you then only need their launcher, and account.
"It's my IP to sit on and do nothing with!"
Eventually, the people who love these games won't be around anymore. Without emulation and ROMs, the earliest games will be like old BBC videotapes: many lost to history, never to be seen again.
Calm down, Konami
They will sit on it and not even get up to use the toilet. Yes, this means that they will just poop all over their IP. They are dumb if they don't want to invest in means of profiting off of their existing IP. Find a legal means of providing distribution to fill the vacuum made after going after pirate websites. If they are going after sites using DMCA, why not look to the music industry as a success and legitimize distribution of ROMs other than on some store that will shut down and the players lose access to games they paid to play?
That is the essence of private property relations. Either abolish them or live with them and all of their consequences.
@@Ved000000Intellectual property shouldn't exist and is not a requirement for private property.
Without the ROMS available online, I would not have been attached to Mario, Zelda, Metroid, etc. And I wouldn't have a nintendo Switch and 3DS
I live in a nation (Lebanon) where Nintendo isn’t popular ( playstation is the most popular). So finding old nintendo console and games is almost impossible. So I tried retro through roms and emulators starting from 2015, and I fell in love with Zelda and other gaming franchises, and that made me want to buy the switch and 3DS.
My issue with the idea of them being illegal roms. Is the part where Nintendo is trying to also destroy the abandonware that they have no rights too. Therefore the idea that its just about protecting copyright is false. Especailly since Nintendo does nothing to save the abandonware that they try to have destroyed.
BUT Nintendo is the rightful owner of the games
Can't even doodle Nintendo characters in your notebook during class without going directly to jail.
😂😂😂 Right?!
That's what happens when Bowser takes over Nintendo.
@@Kinglinkalready happened. Someone in Japan got into jail like Pablo Escobar just because they doodled Nintendo characters romping
Its like Disney banning use of characters on a dead childs gravestone after the kid died from cancer. Just petty greedy evil.
😂
Time spent retro gaming is time not spent on new $70 titles. The industry hates retro gaming unless you're buying a new, full price remake.
or the same game from 30 years ago at the price of a new game and without minimal changes
@@alex7770_or even worse, a subscription cost so you never own the game & just keep handing over money first over fist!
What about when some one gets introduced to a franchise, starts going through it and decided to play new releases becasue of it? Also why not find a way to include those older titles at a rebate and add features. Like so many people play Pokemon randomizers or nuzlocke, or Zelda randomizers, those could very easily just be features in actual releases of the game. Put it on the shop for like a dlc pack for pokemon, or a stand alone randomizer for like 10 bucks. People would buy it, and it would require very little work to put out there too.
Considering how expensive it is to even acquire retro games & hardware? Lol, lmao even
This.
Im a big Gmod fan, and Nintendo recently took down an absurd amount of addons destroying decades of work and history for having any trace of Nintendo properties.
It's true that these included asset rips, (which are frankly already nothing to be upset about, if technically not legal) , but many *many* more were totally original code and content simply inspired by Nintendo properties, frequently created completely from scratch and were artistically distinct from anything Nintendo ever sold.
One of these addons, the map used in the "Team Fabulous 2" animation from 2012 by kitty0706 (Colin Wyckoff), was the last straw for me. Colin was a beloved Gmod machinima animator and passed away in early 2015 after a long struggle with leukemia. This map, which was nothing more than a parody of a mario kart map- built from scratch and laden with memes, ostensibly fanart- had become one of many little memorials to Colin and his work over the years.
This map has been taken down numerous times since this started, despite everyone's best efforts. Nobody seems to be able to keep it up no matter how quiet they are about it or how overt their intentions are with it's preservation.
As someone who grew up with an N64, and whos life was shaped by works by Nintendo, I was always annoyed and baffled with Nintendo's apparent hatred of their own work. Something about this most recent episode with the Gmod community broke something for me though. They're destroying other people's history too, in some cases deeply sentimental work. It's disgusting, I cannot abide this anymore, personally.
When you release art into the world, on some level you are relinquishing some control of it. It becomes part of culture, and on some level something that belongs to everyone. Copyright law has broken how we think of stories and what they actually are.
I have nothing but absolute contempt for this company and the people in charge of it at this point, as well as any other entities that operate like them, and anyone who is an apologist for their actions. I wholeheartedly support preservationists whether their efforts fall under legality or not. Our culture belongs to us.
@Tar-mairon-re8oi ❤
"Stop Liking our stuff!" Nintendo probably
I believe Tor is the answer to preserve everything.
Amen to that
WHOA there buddy
You dropped this 👑
Everything in this video is why I will never buy new Nintendo products
I can understand not wanting your work to be stolen, but being against preservation is just absurd.
That argument would be valid if NSO hasn't alrdy existed for 6 years now
Legitimate question, why?
From a creators perspective, why should they forfeit the right destroy their creation? (Note: I don’t mean that which has been distributed already.)
@@Leaky_Spigot I actually agree with you on this. It is their right to want to erase it. Thats kind of the problem though. There are groups of people that believe art belongs to the consumer once it reaches a certain level. I think it just depends on personal affliction
@@eeyoretriple6 Fair enough. Both are fair perspectives. I’m of the mindset that once you make something public, you give up certain rights to it. Erasure being one of them. If you’re able to convince everyone to agree to its erasure, go for it, but exclusive control over that aspect has been forfeited.
For some games its valid to take them down
Like Devil May Cry 1-3 on PS2/3 for example it makes no sense to allow that given you can buy it off of steam.
But Nintendo games almost ubiquitously are terrible about preservation and the only thing stopping them is U.S law protections standing in there way and saying no otherwise they would exorcise full reign on the Internet Archive and other such places like emulators.
I understand the piracy argument but I also know Nintendo outright abuse the heck out of that argument to be extremely controlling of there IPs to a unhealthy draconian degree. I feel its only piracy if the company is actively selling the game in a means of permanent ownership elsewhere. If there not then in my eyes its not piracy because the company isnt able to make money off the game no matter what you do anyways at that point. While it is there IP there really needs to be a law that forces Copyright exemption if a game is left inactive for to long that should imo only apply if there under permanent purchase constraints not a subscription if were gonna have copyright be this absurdly long. I am fine with a sub service but I would like a permanent means to buy the game if given the option without being punished for seeking out a game there not even selling.
I've been going to Vimm's since the 90's. That was the best Rom site ever. Hope they don't get sued into oblivion or anything. I'm surprised they've dodged Nintendo's wrath for the longest time.
The thing of note here is that it was *Tiktok creators* that put Vimm on the ESA's radar.
That website, and the clones it inspired, are not just menaces, but *damn menaces.*
@@Code7Unltd Well, then! In that case, I'm in *FULL SUPPORT* of the U.S. federal government outright *BANNING* TikTok! If a federal TikTok ban can put a stop to these snitches, then go ahead and ban TikTok in America!
Nintendo (or any company) can't get rid of IRC servers and XDCC bots. Only way to get rid of that is to shut down the internet.
@@Code7Unltddoubtful. This is just conspiracy theorizing. And I'm in my 40s, so I have just as much incentive to dislike the thing that all the kids are using.
I'll never understand WHY these huge game companies don't go the route of the music industry.
If they made free emulators, and sold each classic rom, drm free, for like .99 cents, they'll make a killing.
Because, if you do that, you would need to host those ROMs. You would also need to produce them...and we know that Nintendo lacks the actual copies to produce ROMs.
And the biggest point against it: How could they be selling Remake after Remake for 60 bucks, if the original was available for 99 cents?
@@neros_soren You REALLY hit the nail on the head here. They dont care about the old versions, they just dont want you to play them because of the "remake culture" that the industry seems stagnated in. Sure, some remakes are great, i.e. Windwaker HD, RE2, etc... but then there's low effort BS and no QoL emulation based remasters that people are able to play much better on their own PCs with fan-made emulation programs. Shit really grinds my gears... 😕
Yeah. Apple's iTunes is the reason we know that an official Nintendo ROM site would make money. Back then, people puzzled over how anyone would be able to sell digital music when piracy through file-sharing existed. Apple gambled that people would be happy to pay to get single tracks _a la_ file sharing if they could do it legally and reliably. They succeeded wildly.
This is such an old and completely incorrect understanding of the state of the music industry. Piracy killed the music business and artists make less than they ever have. Subscription model music services only exist at such a low cost because it was the only way to claw back any revenue from “music fans”. Game Pass is the same looming disaster
One word, Licences.
When companies became mostly shareholder owned, the ones in charge stopped caring about the history of the company.
Pride in the company no longer counts; it's all about return on investments.
In my previous job I visited companies daily and often in family owned ones you'd find a small museum showcasing their products from their past.
There is a pride in the history.
Companies who got bought out or were shareholder owned already, never bothered with that "sentimental" stuff.
It's a shame.
Especially for the entertainment industry since those products touched the lives of many and always meant something special.
Remember - "if buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing".
Piracy isn’t stealing ever. Not dependent on any other statement
Word
That only applies to digital
Piracy isn't stealing. Never has been. Copying is not theft.
@@e4iojk He touched on how hard it is to "own" your game from the physical cart. You own the game on a cart but you don't own what's on it?
Remember guys, Emuparadise doesn't have roms on it and there is DEFINITELY no workaround script of any kind
yep, they definitely don't have roms there, it's totally a dead site. Not worth the visit. har har
What an unhelpful piece of advice. Anyway....
Yes…totally unhelpful. There’s DEFINITELY no other way to interpret that.
Curse you for this completely demoralizing comment. I can't imagine a more unaccommodating use of your time. You should be very, VERY ashamed of yourself.
It used to.
Always remember that Nintendo tried to ban the rental of games in their ridiculous belief that the entire world is Japan, and now they only rent these old games on garbage emulators, if you refuse to sell it to me (sell, not rent), I'm off to the high seas, screw you
Not sure where that comes from since games on Nintendo consoles could be rented for years.
@Swampert384 pretty sure they're referring to the subscription based retro games available on the switch. And how Nintendo shut down their eshops on the Wii/WiiU/3DS.
In 1989 Nintendo tried to stop Blockbuster and all companies from renting their video games. @@Swampert384
@@Swampert384google it. They tried to ban rentals, but were unsuccessful in the west, because OBVIOUSLY that was a dumb idea by them.
@@MegaHerpityDerpityno, lol, google it before you yap. This is about when big N tried to stop Blockbuster from renting theirr game carts.
I grew up with an NES but this is exactly the reason that I haven't owned a Nintendo console since the GameCube.
Nintendo: Don't pirate our games
Everyone: Okay, so sell me your old game
Nintendo: No sell, only lawsuit >:3
everyone:
YARRRRRRRRRRRRRR
@@asmo1313I've been yaaaaaarrrrring since 1994 and that's because I wasn't old enough to work a job so i didnt have money to buy games lol.
And also xbox and playstation, but those are your daily drivers so you look the other way. Xbox literally just had a conference where they basically said good bye to discs, and hello to Stadia 2.0. Let me guess, you're not bothered by that?
Xbox succ. It only half worth it.
selling a few copies to nostalgics is not that profitable when the alternative is pirating. lawsuits on the other hand...
I've noticed a pattern: everytime nintendo releases a new product they go after rom sites. This happened when they released the mini consoles and now is constantly happening probably caused by a new legal police inside the company to avoid competition to their NSO app.
just a sign that they have no confidence in being able to produce quality games in the future.
I still remember Nintendo DMCA'd some old Flash Mario Level Maker because they were going to release Super Mario Maker on the Wii U. Also they've DMCA'd 'Another Metroid 2 Remake' (AM2R) because they were planning on releasing Metroid: Samus Returns on the 3DS.
Not related to Nintendo, but Square Enix DMCA'd the English fan-translation project of Final Fantasy Type-0 for the PSP because they were developing FF Type-0 HD for the PS4, which ended up getting localized in English for the first time.
Of course the NSO has been crappy with the release of the retro games
Could be to protect it's IP from genericization and to prevent their copyright being void if it needs to remove anything. However I would appreciate if Nintendo would issue licenses to certain fan projects that it approves of.
@@MikeAruba69 The worst part? Samus Returns was infinitely inferior to AM2R.
I've always wondered how many dev teams when bringing their classic titles back, just downloaded their ROM from one of these sites and then took "heavy inspiration" from existing open source emulators in packaging up their title for re-release. I feel like community preservation is what makes their commercial re-release even possible.
I remember reading that some ot the Nintendo eshop ROMs were found to have headers added by romsites, so they literally were downloading them from rom sites then uploading them to the eshop.
@@DrewPicklesTheDark I can imagine a scenario where prior to sending out the first wave of mass "cease and desist" letters, some junior Nintendo employee is tasked with downloading a full romset first to get the record keeping house in order.
What outrages me is just how often big companies like Nintendo just steal other people's work themselves. Such as ripping off a composer who never licensed their music for reproduction (the "you wouldn't steal a car" anti piracy ad). Or just stealing open source software that requires credit or source code to license. They enforce their copyright to their fullest ability but show no respect to the copyright of others. Frankly I don't recognize the moral legitimacy of how a lot of companies enforce their copyrights. I don't care what the law says. Laws often don't reflect morality or societies interests. I don't believe companies like Nintendo do rightly own their IPs to the point of having the right to destroy them for the entirety of society. Once you publish a work that reaches a certain point in the culture, like for example Mario or star wars or something like that. I don't recognize that the owner has the right to exercise total control anymore. Laws ought to serve society, not the other way around. And society and it's culture is not served by a monopoly group exercising existential level control over a work. Copyright should encourage adding to the culture of a society, not protect destroying it. It should encourage creativity, not discourage it.
Nintendo is so bad at preservation they had to pirate their own games and then take down the sites they used to pirate their own games. Crazy.
They have gone as far as to target SHEET MUSIC in the last month.
IF YOU BUY ANYTHING NINTENDO YOU SUPPORT THAT. SPEAK WITH YOUR WALLET, NO MORE NINTENDO UNTIL THE AGGRESSION STOPS.
No thanks, I enjoy Nintendo products.
The core issue is our current copyright law. I find it completely insane that we have 100 year plus copyrights. The original intention of Copyright (USa) was to give the creators a limited window of time to monetize their creations. The corporations have, Disney in particular (who built there empire partly on the Public Domain), who have turned it into a cash cow for themselves. We need two separate copyright laws, one for individual people thatvallows them to benifet for ther lifeime from there creations and limited one for corporations that makes them make available tfor sale or rental their copyrighted works. If they fail for two years to do so the work should be considered abandoned and immediately fall into the public domain.
yea if look at history can see someone on other side world no contact would come up with same or very simmilar idea, its like these ideas come from the ether or something and they KNOW THIS, detetice conanan is a diffrent copyright in usa as vs japan for example.
Copyrights should last only 4-5 years anymore than that stifles innovation , if said product cant make decent profits in that time period it is a poor product.
I'm not opposed to your solution on a macro level but I think you're missing some of the picture. Many individual creators who sell their work also establish corporations for tax and and other business reasons. This is often done even if the the creator in question is the only payrolled employee at the corporation.
I second this. Companies should not be allowed to just let their IP's rot in a vault for decades while also claiming that emulating them is causing them to lose profits. You can't lose money on properties you haven't sold since the 90's. I think it's pretty reasonable that if a work has been made inaccessible 10 years after its release (as in it can no longer be purchased directly or rented through subscription services), it should be considered an abandoned work and be added to public domain. Not only would that encourage companies to actually preserve their history, but also encourage the continuation of series that would otherwise be forgotten
@Egalitarian917: That would kill almost all non-service software development. Almost literally everything would move to SaS, and you would own even less.
It was the romhack translation of Seiken Densetsu 3 that made the team at Square think that they should localise the Collection of Mana for the Switch.
Right? Publishing Live A Live to the US would have been a rather stupid plan if there wasn't the bomb ass translation patch for it and a grassroots community who loved the game thanks to that patch.
Whats funny is that the version of Trials of Mana on collection is a snes rom running on an emulator. It was dumped and now I am playing it on my own actual super famicom.
If I recall the team behind translating Final Fantasy Type 0 had the same issue. Their translation completed at the same time the game was announced for PS4
We just need more websites offering roms located in countries that don't care about copyright laws
I would say that you’re absolutely right. We need website across the world that are offering these downloadable games and Ron Phorm that don’t actually work with subpoenas similar to the pirate bay so that all they do is offer connections to different people with it on their computer and it’s hard to take them down so if I were a gaming company or an emulation company, I would definitely definitely, be looking to create the system that connects Byron cellar that way you’re not having to do XYZ because there are certain games that I like and then there are certain games that I dislike and the fact that I have to go back and buy that crap through system and then buy a license to use it. What happens if the license goes corrupt or something, that means that I can no longer get my game and no longer play my game because it’s off-limits now so basically I paid for something for nothing and that bothers me so having emulation is reasonable
о да го к нам в россию
Put it in the philippines we don't give two shits about piracy at least not on this level.
It all matters where the site is being hosted at. If its within Nintendos jurisdiction then it isnt safe.
Also, dont store your roms on any cloud services including Google Drive because the have rights to have their IP removed from there too. Store them on hard drives.
You can encypt files you know with a password so its impossible for any one else to know whats in the file.
Every ROM site needs to be located n Russia. Is our safest bet.
Remember that this is the company who sent someone to prison because they sold modified save files. Not roms. Not backup copies. Modded save files.
Imagine what he told the other inmates of why he was in 😂
He must have been the king of his cell 😅
@gregajk I’m sure that what he told family and friends. Behind those cell doors he was more than likely somebody’s bitch.
Japan has a law against unauthorized mods. It's not just Nintendo, it's a few bad actors in Japan with an ironclad grip upon Japan and the international community.
Yeah he made like 90k selling them, selling them. Everyone knows selling and making money off of that is a yuge nono. Dont hack things and then sell them.
I would like to add another point of view besides what you spoke in the video.
Growing up in a third world country, roms and piracy were my pathway to acessing a world I could never dream via legal ways. Learning english, acessing culture, information, entertainment, etc.
I owe my life to hackers, rippers, modders, translaters, pirates, etc.
To me, copyright law as it is serves very well one purpose: keeping poor people poor and rich people rich.
Wise words my friend, wise words.
Welcome to PRICE FIXING naka region codes on DVDs bkursys amd in more recent yrs trying to do much the same with games
Its blatantly illegal in most countries but they get away with it due to fuktards likenthe MPAA lobbyists and the fact that media like the dvds etc have a region code function in them which wasnt originally intended as a lock but as a feature to help with language and subs etc but they corrupted it and use such as a methodnofnprice fixing and the MPAA has major swing with the governing bodies for dvd bluray hdmi etc which they use for this
They try to force player makers to lock the drives/players to X region when they can either leave them unspecd or as region 0 and they will play ALL discs period that way which the MPAA etc tried to stop players like that from being imported esp to NA and western EU ie their cash cows
A classic example wss a movie on dvd cant remember what one but it was a massive hit at the time sold in the US for $40 and in germany for 45E iirc and in india it was sold AT A PROFIT for a whopping $2.50
-but if you used a region locked player in the US etc and say a friend from India came to visit and brought the movie foR you to watch together it would refuse to play due to that one byte used as a bs lock and then to add to it in the us they tried to use the dmca to prevent ppl from changing that including trying to prohibit perfectly legal roms for other regions from the MFRs
It's a shame I mean the main reason I went to download ROMs for Gamecube, Wii, Dreamcast, Sega Saturn, etc was that the sellers online and in-person charge way too much for the games, I can understand $59.99 which is already expensive enough as it is, but going towards 100+ dollars or worse 1000+ dollars, that's bullshit right there. and I HATE what Nintendo is doing to various ROM sites. nobody wants to pay hundreds upon thousands of dollars for one game alone. Sometimes I think billionaires who only think about money and not others should be put in their place. SO yeah, what Nintendo is doing right now causing a war against ROMs, that's bullshit!
And disk media is often unusable if its scratched and not always possible to polish out.
It’s inaccessible.
Yeah, for example Saturn collecting is ridicilously expensive minus some of the most common releases. And not a single dime from those second hand sales and purchases go to devs or copyright holders, so the situation is just ridicilous as outside of collecting original releases, in many cases there is very little financial value with those licences as most people wouldn’t never pay any significant amount of money of those old games. It is also the reason why for some platforms, such as PC, abandonware sites can continue operating. There are many games which copyright ownership is unclear as rights have traded hands numerous times and many owners aren’t pursuing those rights, because there is zero commercial value in the license so they just don’t bother with it. Nintendo is by far the biggest hawk in this business.
It's pointless too since Nintendo doesn't get a single cent out of 2nd hand sales.
Tbf Saturn wasn't successful so.
This is why, other than the NES Classic and SNES Classic, I will never buy another Nintendo product ever again. I'm gonna vote with my wallet.
Or you can buy a switch, a 3ds and a WiiU and crack it :>
If it wasn't for ROMs and ROM hacking, I'd probably be an accountant right now. Nothing against accountants, just it's a drastic change from my day job as someone in IT.
I dunno, intro to accounting was one of the worst classes I ever took. Whatever they get paid, it isn't enough. So many numbers and rules, I can't even begin to comprehend.
@@ocstrangenessnote to self-accounting sucks
I actually learned a lot of IT skills since I took on learning emulation, especially with troubleshooting
Nintendo needs to realize that fighting so hard with piracy isn’t going to stop piracy, if you don’t make your games easily available to buy and save! The virtual console had a great library of classic Nintendo games, but it got replaced with a Netflix or Gamepass style subscription service that you don’t get to own those games!
They don’t care. Their attitude is to try to rule with an iron fist rather get people to not want or need to emulate.
@@DaGhostToastRoast stuff like that is what led to the video game crash in 1983! Because the industry alienated their consumers.
Unfortunately this is a natural progression. You make great games, they sell well, investors need to make money.
Your novel games don't have the margins, so you pull a Disney and re-re-release it. It does well, but it's a one-time boost in profits.
So you make them only available by subscription. The people willing to pay for it sign up quick. It's a one-time booster in profits.
Somewhere there's a board member who's under fire to make more profits, and they don't have a solution - so they're going after the strawman to appease the investors - the "pirates" that are stealing their profit.
The board member knows full-well that the people who are pirating aren't going to turn around and subscribe - this is representative of a hail mary (not for the company, but for an individual executive).
If you're ever curious what board meetings are like, this is it - and you always see these awful ideas right before reshuffling because it's someone trying a last-ditch effort to save their jobs, not customers.
Sometimes companies hire people that actually get it right once the desperate leaders are out... a lot of times they get someone worse. It's a wait and see.
@@Chiberia Yep it’s all about $$$ like always. They want to exploit our love for the old games and monetize us. We cannot own these games anymore. Once the original cartridges are gone it’s gone.
@@Chiberia those investors and especially the board members need to stay away from game development, I don’t want corporate people ruining our video games. Piracy is the symptom from overly monetized video games as a service, instead of preserving games on modern platforms!
my biggest issue with this is that there are still people who rely on piracy due to the country's they live in who wont allow legal ways to buy and play these games. nintendo fighting against these sites that host the roms lessens the access for those people who are forced to resort to piracy just to play them.
Exactly. That's why emulation is huge in the third world
They have tried it for at least 20 years now. No news here.
Well, Nintendo has no say in China or Russia, so these sites would remain.
Maybe they shouldn't live in shithole countries then 🤷♂️
No one is making money of 20 year old games, so why are they copyrighted?
Because it's still they're property unless it's public domain it's they're property they have the right to take action rather you agree or not
This is the most brazen case of punching down in the history of the rom wars.
I'm pretty shocked that they went after Vimm's. That site has retained some tools from the late 90s, and is responsible for a bunch of people becoming interested in game preservation, translation, and new creations for older generation consoles.
Vimm's is also hardly the most brazen offender to their Draconian policies. It's much more than that. I really think this is going to cause a lot more molehills for them to whack down than if they just left it alone.
Remember to not only download your favorites if you can help it. Download random ones as well. Everything deserves to be preserved.
Complete sets, solves the problem. The only problem, once you get over DS games (complete set), they require a lot of storage.
The point about Nintendo not taking down sellers of handhelds with illegal roms is especially damning.
It's not, really. There's millions of those sellers on Amazon and they're all Chinese, so Nintendo can't chase them in court, and they change names more often than most people change underwear. By the time Nintendo sends them a C&D they'll have changed their name to some other shit you've never heard of and be selling the same thing. Going after the sellers on Amazon is like attempting the largest most impossible game of whack-a-mole in the world. It's just not realistically possible.
@@MrSlowestD16 I had not considered all of that, thank you for helping me learn more about this issue!
@@MrSlowestD16 Disagreed, they could fine Amazon for "facilitating piracy" by selling such items.
Yeah esp sicne China isntmknwon to obey the Libs DMCA nor do they get along with the Japanese for many reasons lol
Nintendo doesn’t have the power to issue fines to Amazon.
Dear Nintendo, if you are not selling new copies of that game, its not fucking piracy, its abandonware.
Under the current copyright system, games that my 50 year old father grew up with wouldn't go into the public domain until I'm well into my seventies. Insane.
"You will own nothing" ShekelSchwab of the WEF.
@WeeG-bwc77 And be happy!
full rom sets have been on the internet for over 20 years. they cant ever stop people from downloading old nintendo roms...
If something isn't available to purchase "legally", then for me, it isn't "illegal" to get from other sources.
A lot of these are available to purchase legally, just at ridiculous prices because resellers think games are worth thousands and Nintendo just won’t make another Virtual Console
@@NotAdachiPeople You can always buy it, copy it yourself then try to resell it for the same or even more. Where there is a will there is a way as long as copying tools exist.
@@NotAdachiPeople That's from individual sellers, and doesn't apply to the original manufacturer who has long since ceased production.
@@NotAdachiPeople Agree !!! plus the fact that the old technology is gettign harder to work and nobody really uses CRT screens anymore... it cost nintendo almost 0 dollars to re-release an old console , you can run it off any 2000 tech no problem and that stuff is virtually free a single core AMD 1 gig chip from 2001 could run all the SNES NES AND N64 emulation ... yet nintendo is complaining .. i think companies like taht deserve to go bankrupt. its like selling your computer to a friend then 10 years later when that friend sells it you say hey can i have my games back and can you delete them... people turned to sony by the millions in 1995 and dumped nintendo that mistake cost them billiions of dollars in lost profit and now there worried about roms that lose them 0 dollars and actaully give them free advertising and nintendo brand awareness
This
This is so heartbreaking, and it's not only the video games. This kind of dystopian world.
I am PISSED about vimm's.
Vimm’s was my favorite place for ROMs for years. Now I need to find another site that I can actually trust
Some stuff is still up there get what ya can
(I see what happen now, SOME games got hit) What happen to vimms? It's still up and I just downloaded a few golden sun games and GBA games this week
@@AlmarWinfield yeah all the popular ones mainly, thankfully a lot of the rarer one's are still up.
@@Rowlesisgay this is symptomatic, because if it was the ideological decision, there'd be no game from the Nintendo system left.
Instead, they took down only these games, which they decided, are lost money revenue.
Yeah, it's scary the way things have been going. It's not cheap but I started maintaining a backup of a 48 TB archive of retro games this year.
Thanks man, you and other people doing this are my heroes of preserving histories
Idem
You better make a backup of that backup. Imagine if one day your 48 tb hard drive crashed and everything was erased
@@richarddukard8989
Give away copies before they take it away from you.
Sad to say, hard drive supposedly do not last all that long. Also, file systems can still become corrupted?
@@richarddukard8989 😀It's on an array that can survive 2 simultaneous hard drive crashes, but if you want me to install another array for it's backup, you're going to have to chip in a few bucks. 😂
Every hour you spend playing old roms is an hour that you're not playing switch online and doing the microtransactions. 💰
This makes me want to go and play a ROM even more than usual.
This is probably their main reason. Plus to keep people subscribed to Nintendo online which sucks
I have NSO, I’m not familiar with any micro transactions on there. I just pay yearly
@@ButtholioTheGreat Uh I think that's just a transaction.
@@ButtholioTheGreat i love throwing around words that i don't know the meaning of 🤑
This video made me highly consider backing up my Nintendo Switch games for archival purposes. Not sure if or how this is possible, but I never really contemplated the value of preserving them until watching this. And you made it painfully apparent how Nintendo doesn't seem to care about the preservation of the games. Great video
It was honestly a bit heartbreaking seeing Nintendo, Sega, and Bandai Namco remove so many of their retro and non-profitable games off these video game preservation sites. They offer no alternatives to obtain/ play these games in the modern world. I am not paying for a digital copy of a game I already possess, and the fact many current systems do not offer backwards compatibility just further pushes the notion that we do not really own any of the games we purchased, wether back then or now. They do not offer current methods of playing games we already purchased so why aren’t we able to persevere these games and actually make use of the currency spent?
No shit! Facts!
Yep this is why in some ways I want the video game industry to be more regulated than it is. The sad reality is governments are largely boomers who barely know what a "Mario" is let alone understand the industry and its practices as a whole. Video games should be viewed the same as buying a vacuum cleaner or any physical product. If I buy it, I own it. Reason I say that is when you buy games they say "buy" or "purchase" which are very specific terms when it comes to defining ownership of a product as a consumer. If I "buy" or "purchase" a vacuum cleaner I OWN that vacuum cleaner. The company that made it can't turn off a switch and stop me from using it and force me to buy a new one. The most they can do is stop selling replacement parts and then I have to buy 3rd party which is the same as buying 3rd party gaming consoles and games -- The company that made the product gets $0.00 from me buying 3rd party parts/hardware/games. If a video game company stops offering a video game for purchase on a video game console they currently provide for purchase then that video game should be legally deemed "okay" to torrent and emulate. Either that or these game companies need to be legally forced to use the terms "rent" and "subscription" and "service" on their store pages for their games. Saying "buy" and "purchase" are not uncertain terms. If I "buy" something I own that thing. It is mine. Same thing if I "purchase" something it is mine.
Game companies, outside a very select few, give no fucks about preservation. Old games don't make them as much much as new ones, especially live service games loaded with MTX.
There should be laws being made that makes every single company obligated to preserve their creations for at least a set amount of years and after that, it all becomes public domain.
Best comment here. Force them to preserve their games, otherwise the roms are legal. Would finally put a stop to Nintendo putting nice games in jeopardy.
mate, but nintendo can prove they are preserving their own history, just not to the public.
@@neros_sorenBut that's something that obviously won't happen, and Nintendo makes it easier to apply a Komani (that is, it forgets about the video game industry and does something else) before accepting that.
Preserve doesn't equal "make available" though. What you're asking for is the current system, where they make a thing, then 40 years go by and it's still theirs just kept in the vault. Same thing used to happen with Disney. Enjoy playing your NES games in 2089.
Nintendo first forgets about the video game industry forever, before accepting those conditions.
Copyright law is BULLSHIT. You get 5 years or one year after last production batch that’s *it.* Ask any publisher they’ll tell you 90% of sales happen in the first year. All Nintendo would need was to sell legal ROMs for like, $1 (for older titles) and people would JUMP on that rather than resorting to shady downloads
The original length of copyright law was 14 years + an optional 14 year extension, its wild that even under the original copyright length many older games would be legally inaccessible
Considering that only dates back to 1996 at this point, I'd be ecstatic to get ahold of anything from the 3rd/4th generation of consoles. A shame that lobbying and sacks of money are capable of what we're at now.
You can thank Disney for the crazy long copyright laws
that's absolute rubbish, the only thing slightly like that is life + 70 years for authors of books... what would be the point in making any fiction if you only owned it for 14 years
@@DarkShroom 28 years if you submitted the paperwork for an extension.
Either way this was written into law in 1790, why do authors need more time now when we have the internet to sell your works on?
as far as i'm concerned if they're not selling it, it's abandonware 🤷♀ i know it's not as simple as that but how can they be mad if they are choosing not to make it available for purchase
Absolutely. Wind Waker and Twilight Princess are long gone.
@@usul573 luckily I snatched those 2 for dolphin emulator a month or so ago.
@@usul573
Also the old Pokémon games. RBGY, GSC, RSE, DPPt, and soon to be BW/BW2, all replaced by remakes never to be ported.
It IS as simple as that. Abandoned? It becomes abandonware.
@@abaddon1503 Correct, those two Zelda games were the most prominent examples that came to mind for me at least. Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu! and Let's Go, Eevee! the new remakes on Switch sold well which is cool but the original versions should be preserved.
I'd love if protections were made in regards to preservation. Like if the game hasn't been offered through official channels for a reasonable amount of time, then it's open. Well, more reasonable than literally 70 years after the creator's death. It may sound like, "oh, just wait 5 or 10 years and it's free", but when it comes down to it, if you can't buy it, you can't buy it. If you don't sell it, then how much do you care? Again, the alternative can't be just to never let anyone have the games. And no, to that one guy that thinks that "preservation" should just mean locking it up into a seed-vault type deal, where you don't actually even get to see the games, they just exist in a box. Hell, the very minimum of saying, "yes, you can back up your own games, that's 100% legal and they can't stop you, just don't share it". Come on, video games are the biggest medium in the world, yet it's like so many people still don't take it seriously.
That's why the Internet archive exists complying with the dmca exceptions. Personal private archives aren't affected and or start your own museum of orphan works video games. Obscure
One of the problems with preservation is that original storage media -- magnetic discs and cassette tapes, cartridges and CDs and DVDs -- are prone to deterioration. A second problem is that ROM images can also be lost through deletion, file corruption and compatibility issues.
Without widespread dissemination of retro games, they are always at grave risk of being lost.
Copyright law needs to be changed allowing any game that’s a certain age to be available. These companies don’t care it’s all about 💵💵💵
So your saying that after 20 years it becomes public domain? Is that what you think they should do?
Downloaded ROM sets 15 years ago and have them since. They won't get me.
Same, all Nes and Snes games together in a zip are less than 1gig.
Got em all on my launch box 😎
I did the same too. It’s much more convenient than having to download the ROMs separately.
Ok
@@adrenalinex4 I had BigBox but stopped using it once I tried Batocera. They update all the emulators, add new emulators for systems I never heard of, especially new fantasy consoles. Set up the buttons...you just add roms. Can't be easier.
Valve has shown with steam that going after pirates doesn't make money, just making it easy to buy and play games does. Nintendo would make MUCH more money if they just embraced ROMs, and sold them themselves.
That should tell me this isn't about money, this is about principles. And the principle Nintendo believes in is rarity value.
they can sell their own ROMS that they worked on, but for other games, they need permission or pay a licensing fee to sell those games
Too bad they're welcoming of Denuvo which goes against that philosophy.
@@AICW no they believe in control
No, it's about control. Power hungry. And Nintendo has a long history of that if you look way back before the video games.
I’m not involved with emulation anymore, but around 20 years ago I used to be a moderator/admin on a Russian emulation website. I downloaded most of the roms from torrent sites back then or from cryptic Chinese forums. I also had a few arcade-specific collections (like NG full set or CPS-1/2/3 full set) that I regularly updated and uploaded to UG (if you remember that site, you are old) to keep up with MAME releases. MAME was in C back then and I even made a couple of very small contributions to the code.
I bet even though high profile sites might go offline, there are thousands of full copies of every rom just being kept on someone’s back up drive.
Thank you for your work.
P.S.: I am a widow of UG :(