please consider supporting us on Patreon if you liked this content.

DON’T GO REMAKING MY HEART

There will always be people too poor to play videogames. Outside the realm of criticism, fuck, maybe even inside of it – someone’s experience with the medium will be dictated by what they can afford. After all, a book or a movie is a three dollar experience – and because videogames are expensive to make they are expensive to play.

Decades pushed on from the birth of the internet file-sharing sphere, and it gets harder for a poor person to steal the things they want. Every year the ways to properly emulate classic games dwindle ever so slightly, even as the platforms and programs to emulate them grow exponentially. That’s the grey area isn’t it? Companies shut down all of the places to download old videogames, but never really the programs that run them.  SNESORAMA may have shut down years ago but my heart still stings like it happened yesterday.

Maybe it’s simpler than a huge website filled with hundreds of archival copies of videogames. Maybe it’s just the ESA ‘doing their job’ (all cops are bastards, even digital ones) and putting a soft-lock on what files certain illicit websites can host. It’s an alternative to wholesale shutting things down, but it’s not a better one.

I don’t care about the argument that Emulation hurts the bottom line of companies. I don’t even particularly care that it hurts the value of their “intellectual property”. They certainly don’t care about not forcing staff to work grueling hours for pay worth less than what’s being made. Emulation is one of the few things that’s made classic videogames available for thousands of us the world over.
To say nothing of the times I’ve watched title after title hit the market while I close my blinds to the outside world and play Chrono Trigger the thousandth time without beating it. I never beat Chrono Trigger except once, but having it whenever I wanted it sure is great.

Emulation serves to make a point of what the history of videogames looks like. Giant companies that make millions be damned, Emulation allows more than a share of the working poor access to classic videogames. This is a point more important than anything true about archival history. Knowing that these games are safe somewhere is one thing. Everyone having access is much more important.

Sure, by golly there are alternatives. There was even a point in time you could download Turbografx-16 games on the Wii – oh, you mean you can’t now because Nintendo shut down the service? In that case, let’s flock to the store and all buy WIIU’s before they shut down the virtual console there too.

Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening released the other week to some fanfare. A re imagining of the Gameboy classic. With aesthetics similar to the toy-like nature of the original Gameboy, the remake tells you: this is important software. Just like Nintendo’s website claims:

“Nintendo is famous for bringing back to life its popular characters for its newer systems, for example, Mario and Donkey Kong have enjoyed their adventures on all Nintendo platforms, going from coin-op machines to our latest hardware platforms. As a copyright owner, and creator of such famous characters, only Nintendo has the right to benefit from such valuable assets.” In other words, what is important is how the market decides you can enjoy our software. Links Awakening is important and you do not need to care about something like Oracle of Ages. Maybe this is all their attempt to still get us to forget that Wand of Gamelon was ever a meme.

Of course Link’s Awakening: DX: HD: Switch Version is fantastic. An experience that matches visual aesthetics to a simpler form of Zelda shielding and slashing. A soundtrack that tickles the dusty parts of my idiot, child brain that remembers playing it on a hard-to-see scream. If you had a similar experience, detract or add background noise of parents having arguments.

It is a clever revival of a piece of not-forgotten history, but is still ahistorical. Nintendo is not the only company that shuts down emulation sites in an effort to preserve “the strength of intellectual property”. We have to look at emulation with history always in mind: anti-piracy laws are not just anti poor, they ensure companies like Nintendo decide what is historically important. Don’t believe what they tell you about any of it. The true strength of any intellectual property is how many people get to enjoy it on their own terms, and for how long.

Emulation doesn’t just preserve the real history of videogames. It’s allowed works to stay alive long past the time that their dead – and allowed creators of all types to interrogate what they mean. Not only does Emulation persist as a tool for poor people to enjoy videogames, it’s allowed creators of classic titles to speak about developing them in ways they weren’t afforded when they were originally released.

Sure, Links Awakening is sublime. It’ll never be more important to steal the original.