Nintendo’s mass takedown of emulator code is misguided
Emulators are what got me into Nintendo gaming as a child!
When I was an unemployed 13-year-old I first played Nintendo 64 games on a PC emulator (UltraHLE). I have such fond memories of playing the original Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on my Windows 98 desktop computer. It didn't work perfectly and was glitchy, but it was what I had and I loved it. Later, when I dropped out of college I splurged and bought myself a GameCube. Now I'm a 42-year-old tech bro and I just completed the Ocarina of Time Remake for Switch 2—on my Switch 2 console. Thanks to emulators, I grew up loving Nintendo games and now that I have the money to pay for them, I do.
This got drowned out by all the NVIDIA craziness, but yesterday IGN reported that Nintendo filed DMCA takedowns on emulator code hosted on GitHub. It’s stupid to keep seeing headlines like this. Emulation in and of itself does not illegally circumvent Nintendo's technological protection measures, and it does not violate Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Nintendo keeps fighting to keep the code for Yuzu Emulator off the Internet, even though the code itself does not contain decryption keys that circumvent Nintendo's software DRM.
The DMCA allows intellectual property holders to strike down content from the Internet without ever getting a court order, and Nintendo is abusing it with gusto in their ongoing crusade against software emulation. Through repeated DMCA takedowns and fight-to-the-death lawsuits Nintendo’s actions create a chilling effect on open source software development in this space—but this is a seriously misguided strategy.
Emulators themselves have commercial value and are used legitimately by software companies to port older games to newer platforms, such as Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection for Xbox 360, or—ironically—Nintendo's own release of Wii games for Android in China. Nintendo’s lawsuits and harassment against the actual geniuses who research and come up with emulation software will only hurt them in the long run when they have to re-re-release Ocarina of Time for the 10,000th time on a new microarchitecture. And it might keep some people from ever discovering and falling in love with Nintendo games in the first place.