So can someone tell me why they aren't just taking these IPs and just selling them on Steam or something?
Official Nintendo Museum closed down over cease or desist letter by Nintendo
Museums are about preserving the authenticity of their subjects. In this case, that means preserving the look and feel of playing a game as authentically as possible, which means running it on the original hardware. This isn’t just hypocritical considering their stance on emulation, it’s bad museum curation.
I think museums are actually a perfect application for emulators! Don't get me wrong--nothing beats picking up my childhood Game Boy and playing some Pokémon Blue or Super Mario Land. But in a museum context, exhibits have to be robust, and you'd likely be churning through consoles as they withstand all manner of abuse. More interestingly, emulation can allow you to do things that just aren't possible with real hardware.
Random example off the top of my head: let's say you wanted to have an exhibit where you want to have patrons do Bowser throws as a demonstration of how Super Mario 64 tried a lot of new things (some more successful than others). How would you set this up on original hardware? Let's say you set up the game with 99 lives paused as the player enters a Bowser fight. Sure, this will allows someone who dies to enter a bunch of times, but as soon as someone wins, exits course, or runs out of lives, your exhibit is borked and you'll need a staff member to come and fix it, which will take a not-insignificant amount of time and require game-specific knowledge. But if you use an emulator, you can use save states and set the emulator up to automatically reload a save state pauses at the start of the fight whenever someone leaves. If you use a replica N64 controller they will get a practically indistinguishable experience while also allowing for a much more functional exhibit.
That's a simple example, but the sky's the limit with emulation. I was just looking at a super cool preservation project which translates exclusive mobile features from the Japanese version of Pokémon Crystal into English and also interfaces with replacement server software to allow users to replicate the experience of being able to hook your Game Boy up to a cell phone and access services like trading, battling, and news bulletins. Even if you had all the original hardware, it wouldn't work because the network technologies old phones rely on have long done been sunsetted. But with emulation (and perhaps some trickery with the physical exhibit for immersion) you could set up an exhibit that lets patrons experience this really ahead-of-its-time netplay feature.
Nintendo could pay the salary for one retro gaming hardware restoration YouTuber and they would be able to restore and set up every single console within months
An entire wing of the museum could show how they restore the old consoles, replace the capacitors, use new or new old stock chips to replace failed ones, de-yellow the console plastic, etc.
They want to sell new shit or sell repackaged old shit in tiny overpriced bundles with Ice Climbers.
Ice Climbers is one of my favorite Nintendo Entertainment System video games!!! I also love classics like Urban Champion and Balloon Fight!!!
·9 hours agoPunished Lumalo??
I imagine Nintendo's corner of LinkedIn is like the Cocytus level of hell.
You don't see sega giving anyone shit about emulators.
Hold on, I gotta put 3000 AA batteries into my GameGear emulator
Game Gear was peak. Shame about that battery life though.
Imagine being Nintendo with unlimited money and you can't even scrap together parts to run a Super Famicom for a museum
I thought this is what those stupid mini consoles were for, "please don't emulate, buy this little emulation machine instead only it's OFFICIAL."
You will pay hundreds of dollars for decades old game bundles of over five games and one of them will be Ice Climbers, you loyal pay piggies.
I like how Animal Crossing GCN had a bunch of emulated NES games on it included in the cost of the game lol
Smash Bros Brawl had them too but with a time limit of 2-3 minutes, but with a cheat you could bypass it lol
It'd be funny if Nintendo was violating some kind of FOSS non-commercial use term of the emulation software (they probably are)
May be an in-house emulator. They used an emulator for the virtual store on the wii, wiiu, and DS so they very likely have one.
It’s funny because I can walk to a local flea market right now and buy a number of bootleg consoles with every nes/snes game included.
