By Nelson Schneider - 02/15/15 at 02:11 PM CT
The friendly hackers of GBAtemp have, once again, laid bare the inner workings of a Nintendo gaming platform. Where Team Twiizers opened up the original Wii to homebrew and emulation via their fantastic Homebrew Channel, a homebrewer named Smealum is responsible for opening up the 3DS.
However, what is the most interesting about the news of the 3DS being hacked isn’t the fact that it is now possible to run homebrew on Nintendo’s latest handheld (provided one refrains from ever downloading official updates again). Instead it is the newfound knowledge that Nintendo has fully-functional emulators and has been holding out on us.
When the Virtual Console first launched on the Wii, many people assumed that instead of a garden variety emulator, such as the ones that have been floating around the Internet for over a decade, old games sold via the VC were encased in a custom wrapper that allowed them to work with new hardware. That illusion has been stripped away with the revelation that 3DS homebrewers have been able to successfully inject unofficial ROMs of Game Boy Advance titles into the 3DS’ GBA emulator and get them to work.
I have been disdainful of Nintendo’s Virtual Console practices since the service initially launched. While the rumors prior to the VC launch made it sound like it would be a wonderful gift to the Nintendo fan community that would provide access to complete NES, SNES, and N64 back catalogs for free gratis, the reality that materialized was an overpriced and extremely limited selection of titles that were locked to specific devices via draconian DRM. Since the beginning of the VC, I have vocally wondered why Nintendo didn’t just write official emulators for their old platforms, sell the emulators for a reasonable price, then give away the old games for free gratis, thus earning goodwill among their fans, expanding their fanbase into the newer generations who were born after the NES and SNES were long dead, and circumventing much of the legal BS that comes with trying to sell products made by companies that no longer exist or only continue to exist as part of a larger conglomerate.
But no, instead of selling us $50 emulators and giving us free, legal access to complete libraries of classic console games, Nintendo decided to nickel and dime us to death with one-off digital rereleases that frequently cost more than used physical copies of the same games that can be found floating around used game stores, pawn shops, and flea markets. With the revelation that they have had working, fully-compatible emulators all along, this kind of customer disservice seems even worse.
Nintendo has not been doing so hot lately, and has been leaning hard on that nostalgia crutch, what with the “NES Remix Pack” and “Nintendoland” serving as much as museum curation as entertainment. If the Internet Archive can successfully release huge swaths of old abandonware games, Nintendo surely has the ability to come up with a similar solution that will both provide value to gamers and revenue for themselves.
As Steam and GOG have shown us on PC, it is entirely possible to compete with software pirates on their own turf, provided the competing service offers good value for the money, is unobtrusive, and just works. None of the console makers have been able to provide the same kind of positive customer experience with regard to selling classic games digitally… well, they ARE capable of it, but they simply refuse to do what needs to be done. Nintendo needs to drop the charade that releasing any given classic title involves a lot of work and costs a lot of money. They have official emulators. They can crib off of open source unofficial emulators to make their official ones better. They have the online infrastructure to distribute verified clean ROMs. Nintendo only lacks the will do to what needs to be done: Sell us these emulators, then give us the games.
