Is Emu-Paradise no longer having Roms the begining of the end of Video Game History ?

Well seeing as I am most known for being that Super Nintendo guy a lot of the time, well I couldn't help but comment on the recent semi shoot down of EmuParadise. A lot of people will think of EmuParaide as that site full of game Roms and to a degree that is kind of true but id like to think that it was a lot more than that. Yes it was a place you could go to get Roms but it was also sort of a digital museum that celebrated retro gaming and even  helped to remind people of old games that they might have forgotten. Now you probably noticed I said semi shutting down and not shutting down well that's because the Roms are going but the site is not.

The situation with regards to emulation sites has been changing recently. Sure there have always been companies who have been hostile to it, companies that have thrown there weight around with legal threats and complaining to hosts demanding that Roms be removed but right now we seem to be in the eye of a storm and rather than put its team members in a position of risk EmuParadise has decided that it needs to change. Yeah I think its a shame to loose a good source of Roms, one which came without the risks of viruses and such but I think its good that it will continue to exist as a resource which will help chronicle the history of games even if it cant help people to actually play them.


Some people are saying that this shift is the beginning of the end, that it signals the beginning of the death of video game preservation. You see companies like Nintendo might be afraid that if people use emulators and Roms for free then they wont pay money for virtual console style games or collection discs or official mini consoles and well that is to some degree a fair argument, some people wont pay £6.50 to play Super Metroid on there Wii U or New 3DS if they can simply download it for free and use an emulator to play it on there PC. So if you look at it from Nintendo's few point then emulators and roms do kind of suck. Looking at it from the consumers point of view and also the video game historians point of view though and you will start to see a whole new range of issues and arguments.

Look at it in this way, if a person was to remember a game, one which meant a lot to them, one which held a special place in there heart, one that they had played in there youth well what about when you want to play that game what do you do? Well you have a handful of options one of them is to look up the original hardware and software, another is to look for a modern legal way to get the game be it to buy a micro console with preinstalled games or to look at old game compilation discs or a console system based marketplace and the third one of course is to download an emulator and a rom so that you can play the game on your PC. Now there is this idea which some companies and even people have which basically goes like this every one when they are downloading a rom are doing it because there a dirty pirate who wants to have something without paying for it and that basically if you do this then you are a thief.

OK so if  Sonic the Hedgehog is available on pretty much every console's market place, is also available on PC through Steam, on the Android phone store, on the I-Store and is on a whole bunch of officially licensed micro consoles and you still decide sod all that noise I am just going to grab it for free then you could make an argument that your basically stealing it because you don't want to pay for it but this is really simplifying matters. You see there are a lot of games which you cant pay for at the moment but you might want to play, games which are not available for all kinds of reasons, licensing issues, the company that made them no longer existing, perceived lack of interest by the owners. In these cases if you really really want to play the game then what do you do? Well you either get an original copy of the game and its hardware or you have to emulate. In both of these cases the studio that made the game is not going to profit. Game Studios do not get any money from you going on ebay or visiting a retro game store and paying for an old copy of one of there games. Its a little extreme to expect someone to pay lets say £1000 for a rare arcade cabinet just to play a game which they could easily use a computer to emulate. Plus and this is the real kicker hardware doesnt last forever especially if its some custom chip arcade game like one of the old pre jamma board ones, so if we only play a game using real hardware eventually this hardware will break and there might even be a time where we no longer manufacture the parts with which even the most tech savvy of people could manage a repair. Old machines will eventually die out and if there are games which no one is re-releasing on modern platforms then there is a chance that these games could die out as well.

I have to admit though that I am not as worried as a lot of other people and you know why? Its simple you can get tough on roms and kick up a stink but you will never get rid of it, at the very most you will simply push things underground a bit. Lots of us are sitting on huge supplies of Roms now and we will continue to swap and trade these and as long as that happens then not only can we play the otherwise unplayble but we can also hold on to our video game history.