Culture Quest
Everything old is new again.
Hey friends 👋
I can hardly believe it's already been two months since I wrote an Update. In some ways, it was incredibly freeing to not have the deadlines I always impose upon myself—especially because I would not have been able to meet them—but in other ways it left me feeling a kind of emptiness; a lack of creative fulfillment.
I Filled the Void With Leisure
The past two months were incredible. I spent many of my days on beaches, in nature, or otherwise eating and drinking my way across several continents.
I had needed to recharge my battery and remind myself that the IRL world is very different than the world we might perceive if we spend all our time online. And as I wrote in the last update, I really was beginning to feel the need to log off.
After bronzing (read: burning) my skin taking seaside siestas, I returned home to a much colder Canadian climate, and, not yet ready to end my sabbatical, I turned to other neglected pastimes; namely a rather hefty media backlog.
I finally made my way through the series Twin Peaks (a camp masterpiece!), I read a few books (Vonnegut remains unparalleled), and I started making time to play video games (Final Fantasy V is a gem). It was honestly rejuvenating.
I've spent so much of the last decade working, grinding, hustling, trying to get ahead, to the point that I'd lost that all-important sense of the value of leisure. There is a saying that Europeans work to live and Americans live to work. Having spent a good amount of time this year between these two worlds, I can attest to this distinction, and I'm longing to bridge the divide—for myself at least.
Gaming the System
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with video games. I had a Super Nintendo and used to rent game cartridges from the local video store. I had to try to beat them as fast as possible, so I wouldn’t have to take them back to the store, and hope beyond hope that no one deleted my save file before I could afford to rent the game again.
Note: If you never had someone save over your game, then you don't know how good you have it. I'm looking at you genZ.
The 16-bit era, which was effectively the SNES and Sega Genesis era, was (and remains) my favourite period of gaming history, and I'm somewhat stuck in it, as I'll explain. In the early 2000s, though, it was harder to find these games to rent and I was way too broke to buy them, so I turned to emulation to revisit some of my old favourites, as well as to try some obscure titles that I never had the chance to play on physical media.
Back then, emulators worked well enough. You had to use a desktop computer and keyboard, but you could make it work. And some games worked pretty well via this medium, especially JRPGs like the Final Fantasy series.
Much like file-sharing was relatively ubiquitous at the time, as I wrote about in a previous Update, the use of emulators to play ROMs, for those who even knew what these things were, was seen as a similarly victimless crime. In fact, as I intend to argue below, I feel to this day that emulation is not only victimless, but not a crime, and arguably, a genuine boon to society.
But we'll get there.
NOTE: Nothing I write should be considered legal advice. While I may encourage, rhetorically, that you subvert the law, which clearly exists to serve only the greediest members of the capitalist class, doing so is your choice and is subject to prosecution within the legal framework of the country in which you engage in said activities. Do so at your own risk.
ROM Comedy
I went several years without emulating any games. I had bought a fancy PC with an NVIDIA graphics card and spent many months playing my way through open-world epics like Skyrim and Grand Theft Auto V, as well as smaller—but no less addicting—indie hits like Fez and Stardew Valley. I got lost in these sprawling epics and cozy-core adventures and was temporarily free from any craving to boot up an emulator and replay Chrono Trigger or Secret of Mana.
But over the last few years, I have been longing to revisit these older games, to experience that feeling of nostalgia and to basque in the beauty of gameplay from the time before micropayments and battles royale defined genres.
When Nintendo added SNES games to their Nintendo Switch Online service, I played through The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, which is one of my all time favourite games, and I was immediately struck by how mediocre of an experience it was. Not the game itself, which remains a masterpiece, but the rather low-quality emulation Nintendo feels comfortable charging a subscription fee to access.
Dissatisfied, I turned to youtube to look at the best way to play such classic games, and I was sucked down the rabbit hole of retro hardware collection, modding, and FPGA. I became convinced that I needed to buy an Analogue Pocket—a stunningly designed and marketed Game Boy clone—and amass a collection of rare games, to play my way through the classics on real hardware. And early this year, I did manage to acquire one of these oft-out-of-stock hipster status symbols, only to discover... buying games is crazy expensive.
Games from my childhood were now going for tens, hundreds, or even thousands of dollars; if they were even available. And worst of all, most of the websites and shops I came across with halfway reasonable prices, couldn't even verify they were real copies rather than fakes.
I knew I wasn't cut out for this world, and given that I'd had no qualms with emulating in the past, I gave up and was ready to sell off my new toy.
As if they'd read my mind, Analogue suddenly announced that Open FPGA (a way to run ROM files on the Pocket's specialized hardware) was being enabled via a firmware update. I quickly upgraded, installed some ROM files, and decided to try my luck with a game from the Legend of Zelda series that I had never paid any attention to growing up: The Minish Cap, for the Gameboy Advance.
I could not put it down. I had so much fun and burned through the whole game in under a week of casual gaming and that sparked something in me; a new obsession... with the old.
I started looking for other games I had never played and I was taken down yet another YouTube rabbit hole about the flourishing modern emulation scene, which was spurred on by the rise of open-source emulation frontends like RetroArch and EmulationStation as well as the modern retro handheld boom.
Finding this community, and seeing what they contributed to the world, convinced me, beyond a shadow of a doubt that emulation is not only superior to playing games on original hardware, but that it is a crucial service of cultural preservation and archiving, and that paying for old games is, if you really think about it, somewhat silly.
I will break down each of these arguments below.
The Superior Way to Play
While there is something to be said for the experience of pulling a dusty old game cartridge off the shelf, blowing into it, and carefully nestling it into the bizarre cassette-deck slot of the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES); this is likely to come with a number of pretty serious tradeoffs.
Assuming that you could even find and afford to purchase the games you want, they are subject to substantial wear, including, as I learned recently, eventually becoming unable to save game-states.
The core issue [is] with how these gaming cartridges were designed. Every time you insert a game cartridge into your console, the contacts are worn down bit by bit. Even if you have a more recent cartridge-based console like the Super NT, your cartridges will degrade over time. In addition, many games from the 16-bit era use a volatile memory system that relies on an internal battery built into the cartridge and is difficult to replace without losing your saved data.
— Source: IFIXIT
To play these games, in the righteously proclaimed "way they were intended" requires original hardware. Not just the game system itself, but the televisions they were made for, the cables that were intended to be used, and so on and so forth.
If any part of the stack is incorrect or degraded, your experience will not be "as intended" but, rather, will be much worse than at the time of release, or than would be experienced by any other modern method. And if you want to use older consoles with newer TVs, you'll need to spend hundreds, or even thousands on special adapters to keep it from looking absolutely awful and being full of input lag that makes the games essentially unplayable.
Meanwhile, emulation has improved so dramatically that you can now emulate most games on your phone or an inexpensive retro handheld like this $50 device from Ambernic. This improvement comes in large part thanks to open-source software built by the robust and passionate community in this space; like the aforementioned Retroarch and EmulationStation.
These tools open up new worlds of possibility. For example, here are some things you can do with emulators that you (mostly) can not do with original video game hardware:
Add fan-translations to Japan-only games to play them in English or other languages
Add patches that fix issues like slowdowns and frame-skipping for games which were poorly coded and rushed out at the time of release
Add patches that improve gameplay of games that are notoriously grindy or frustrating
Add effects to more closely emulate the original hardware these games were developed for (CRT scanlines, blur effects, bilinear filtering etc)
Upscale graphics for modern screens and add additional graphics-processing
Play modern indie games developed for older platforms as well as fan-made games and spoofs (known as RomHacks)
Note: there is a community of game developers and studios releasing games on original (replica) cartridges. This is cool, but largely caters to the very niche audience of retro gamers with original hardware or FPGA systems. I see this as complimentary, and even symbiotic, to the culture of ROMs and emulators, rather than a true alternative.
This brings me to my next point.
For the Love of Games
The reason for this modern retro revival is simple: these old games were fantastic. They were labours of love by skilled developers, built to stand out in a what was, even back then, a world with too many different attractions vying for an individual's attention—hard to believe, I know, given how tame that period's media landscape looks in retrospect.
And yet, many games were manufactured in such limited quantities, that those of us alive in this heyday of these grey plastic goodies, never encountered them. Many games from the later years of a consoles life were printed in the tens of thousands, and some never even reached the US.
So those who want to collect these artifacts of 20th century culture, to preserve or to play, must reconcile with the fact that, of this original limited supply, those cartridges which have somehow not been degraded beyond recognition, lost to landfill, or locked away in some billionaire's vault of "scarce physical assets," may never be able to be experienced by the next generation of enthusiasts.
It is, in essence, preservation in only the most antiquated sense. Like locking up the manuscript of a famous author in your basement, it is only preserved in the sense that it is not destroyed; and only so long as that remains true. It is a tragedy, either way. Art, in any form, is intended to be experienced by the many, not the few.
The Importance of the Archivist
Culture is too easily lost. The library of Alexandria was razed to the ground and with it went most of recorded antiquity. More recently, the Internet Archive, the preservation powerhouse that backs up everything from classic cinema to concert recordings, from offline webpages to out-of-print magazines, from newspaper articles to Nintendo games, has been under attack from cyber-attackers and copyright lawyers alike.
This has grave implications for the preservation of culture. I wrote about the Internet Archive and the importance of their work on decentralization in my post "Peer-to-Peer Review" and they continue to be a massive inspiration to me in terms of how committed they are to the betterment of society through archiving as a permissionless and perpetual public good.
As I was saying, the IA was recently under a sustained DDoS attack for several days and, during that time, hackers gained access to a substantial amount of user data as well. For this reason, if you had an account, it is advisable to change your passwords and perhaps even use an app to try to remove your data from the dark web.
Note: I don't know if those work, but I'm just putting it out there.
Another thing you should do, in the wake of this attack, is support the Internet Archive financially. And if, like me, you're hesitant to put your personal information into a website that just suffered a user-data breach, then you can do what I did, and donate with cryptocurrency.
Donating with crypto is fast and easy, protects your private information, and can be done from anywhere in the world. So, if you believe in their mission and you don't want to support by credit card, google pay, or paypal, then consider sending some solidarity satoshis their way.
While the attack may have ended, the battle is far from over.
Nintendo vs The Internet (Archive)
As I mentioned earlier, when I tried playing A Link to the Past on Nintendo Switch Online, I was really taken aback by how poorly executed this paid offering was compared to the experience I've had with ROMs and emulators in the past—this in spite of the fact that these games are themselves just ROMs running in emulators.
I wasn't the only person who noticed this either. Retro games on Switch Online are known to be buggy, offer no graphical enhancements and few, if any, user-centric features; and, in all the years its been running, not that many games have been added, especially when you consider that Nintendo has been raking in around $1B annually from the service for several years now.
What this shows to gamers is that Nintendo feels that they should be able to gatekeep 30-40 year old games, provide a limited selection of them via low-quality user-experiences, and charge whatever arbitrary fee they decide upon, in perpetuity. And while that may legally be the case—due to absurd laws, that I'm going to argue we should subvert and dismantle—the internet is not having any of it.
For at least as long as these games have been out of print, smart game-loving coders have been creating emulators and ripping ROM files from cartridges to share these iconic cultural artifacts with others. It's worth noting that emulators have been deemed legal, at least so far, in every court case that's been held. But ROMs are another story as they typically contain copyrighted intellectual property (IP). There are many sites hosting these ROM files but they do so at their own risk and frequently have to remove files due to DMCA takedowns, most of which comes directly from Nintendo.
However, the Internet Archive has a special exemption to the DMCA which allows them to share software as part of their archival mission. This is why many ROMs can be found on the archive.org website. The exemption is reviewed every three years and the video game industry lobby is working hard to end it once and for all. So if you agree with any of the opinions I've expressed so far, and you live in the US, I have a call to action for you:
Consider writing to your congressperson to argue in favour of enshrining this exemption. And while you're at it, push for reforms to shorten the length of copyright, which is currently an absolutely absurd duration. Like really, I don't think many people realize just how long a copyright is in effect in the US.
Generally, for most works created after 1978, protection lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years. For anonymous works, pseudonymous works, or works made for hire, the copyright term is 95 years from the year of first publication or 120 years from creation, whichever comes first.
This brings me to my final, and likely most contentious point.
Fuck Copyright (With Some Caveats)
If you go on YouTube or Reddit looking for content about ROMs, you're likely to encounter some variation of the statement:
As long as you own a copy of the game, it's ok for you to play a ROM of it.
This is stupid. It's stupid because we know people don't own the games and we know that for the most part they don't dump their own cartridge files to ROMs. When people say this, they are not being honest; they are trying to protect themselves from overreaching laws they fear will destroy their livelihood.
It's also stupid because math. There aren't enough games in existence for everyone to own physical copies. There never were. And you may have noticed, these collectors are not offering to share. And perhaps most importantly, it stupid because if you were to go out and buy a physical copy of a game today (again, assuming it's not fake), the game's creator would get nothing from that sale.
Market Make-believe
Have you ever thought about the fact that when you buy a game on the secondary (used) market, none of the money goes to the IP holder. And certainly none of it goes to the real creators (writers, artists, coders) of the game. So while you may be supporting a local shop that cultivates a vibe and offers a cool selection of niche products—and that's a wonderful reason to spend your hard-earned v-bucks—there is no difference whatsoever to Nintendo than, for example, if you download a ROM "illegally." So it's pretty silly to say you need to own a physical copy in order to justify your playing of a ROM.
The reason companies like Nintendo want to block you from using ROMs, unless you own a copy, is because they know that you probably won't ever own a copy. And they don't want you to. In fact, they would happily make it illegal to play the old copy if they could. They want you to pay purchase prices for digital copies that you can only technically rent, and one day, they want to force you to buy them again on a new system. That's Nintendo's actual game—pun intended.
Now, I can already hear someone saying "if we use NFTs, then we can pay secondary royalties, and Nintendo can earn money forever for a game they happened to license in the 80s." And while that's certainly technically possible, it's also a nightmare scenario of market speculation, financial surveillance, and complex DRM enforcement. And more importantly, it misses the point entirely...
Nintendo got their money. They released the game, they sold a bunch of copies, they made rereleases and sold those copies, they made remakes, and they sold those copies, they sold digital copies; they made movies, sold toys and t-shirts, and again, they made $1B last year from Nintendo Switch Online alone. They made 11 billion dollars in total.
I do not believe that Nintendo should be able to make money off a ROM file of a 40 year old, out-of-print game. In fact I think it's quite foolish that people defend copyright in this way. There are other ways for Nintendo to make money off of old IP, like:
If they create a remake, they can sell copies of that new version, and maybe even have some limited copyright over that to prevent distribution during a reasonable period like 5 years. They should be able to keep selling copies of that game to anyone who wants to buy it for as long as they want to or at least as long as people are willing to buy it. But the remake should in no way affect the old copyright. Owning, sharing, playing, or remixing the original game files should be open to anyone.
Providing a service like Nintendo Switch Online allows them to charge users a fee that includes a number of perks, including a library of emulated games. That's cool. Charge for that service. But this should have absolutely no effect on people's ability to obtain these ROMs freely and play them on other devices. What they are offering, by their own admission, is not ownership, but access. They can charge for this service, because it’s just that: a service. But their offering of this service should not grant them the ability to restrict users from accessing these out-of-print games elsewhere.
Why Do I Care?
One of the themes of my content is the importance of subverting capitalist power. I believe that it is probably the greatest threat to humanity in the modern age. Proof of this shows up in many glaring violations of the social contract like grocery store price gouging, for-profit prisons, and the military industrial complex. It shows up in negative externalities like toxic runoff from industrial agriculture, climate change from fossil fuel production (and war), and the mental health damage caused by the algorithmic attention economy.
It has at times been hard to reconcile my anticapitalist belief system with the fact that I think a lot of the things people make in this world are cool and unique, and the world is better for their existence. And I believe creators should be compensated for their labour. But copyright is not for the workers. Copyright is the intersection of finance and corporate law, poisoning creative work to enforce profitability for those who contributed nothing other than money (capitalists).
Copyright contributes to cultural flatness, by making singular intellectual properties so valuable that eventually all creative ideas just become skinned with a particular IP. It feels like Zelda is a brilliant franchise, but in reality, each game could have been an opportunity to introduce players to new characters and new worlds, rather than just imposing non-canonical lore atop a profitable trademark.
And more importantly, from the leftist perspective, copyright seeks to allow people who weren't even involved in the labour of a creative work's development to reap arbitrary rewards long after the work has been produced. The ability of money to make more money without contributing anything new to the world, is what bolsters the class divide. And we may never see the end of wealth inequality until copyright is abolished.
Hard Reset
By whatever means possible, I believe everyone should revisit old video games. There is a wealth of incredible storylines and challenges to experience. The more you play them, the more you realize how contrived many modern games are. It will give you an appreciation for the craft of game development, and perhaps even inspire you to create your own games.
The best way, in my opinion to experience everything, up until about the Playstation 2, is via emulation. It's easy, fun, and there is no ethical case to be made for avoiding this. In acquiring these games, if you can store copies if the ROM files, ideally on physical backups, you are doing a form of preservation— manuscript under the bed style—just be wary of distributing them in a way that financially benefits you, as that will almost certainly get you in the cross-hairs of the industry.
Additionally, if you own physical copies of old games, or if you owned them when they were new, or if you subscribe to Nintendo Switch Online, or own remakes of older games; then definitely don't hesitate to explore those same games on emulation, because again, there is really no sane argument for why you can't, be it legally or ethically.
However, there is one grey area that I want to address. With the Switch, Nintendo made an absolute garbage piece of hardware that can barely play the games they release for it. It is quite literally a cheap Android tablet with controllers stuck on; and I say this as a Switch owner who's logged a lot of hours on the device. It is not surprising then, that emulator developers were able to match, and quite quickly surpass the Switch's capabilities to offer players far better experiences than they could have on stock hardware.
Two such projects, Yuzu and Ryujinx, have both been shut down by Nintendo, in a belligerent legal assault. It would have been quite easy to make the case that users who own the games should be able to play them on these emulators. These games, after all, go for between $60-100 and rarely go on sale. Still Nintendo found a number of grievances to file, and in the end they won, and absolutely ruined these emulator developers’ lives.
For modern games, currently available for sale and less than 10 years old, there is a reasonable legal and even ethical case that users should pay for them. But if Nintendo is going to provide gamers with nearly decade-old low-grade hardware, players should absolutely be able to choose a better experience with the game they purchased lawfully.
But as I said before: Nintendo doesn't believe that you do, or should even be able to, own their games. They want you to rent them, play them on their terms, and forfeit them when they’re ready to sell you a new edition. So I'm going to let you in on a little secret that will help you avoid being fleeced in a way that is as soft-core as it is sneakily subversive:
The Library Economy
Did you know public libraries carry many things besides books? It's true. They offer digital goods like ebooks and audiobooks which you can rent out via apps like Libby. They have magazines and movies, CDs and, believe it or not, video games.
I checked my local library and found that they have all kinds of new and old Switch games, as well as modern releases for PS5, Xbox Series X, and plenty of older titles as well. For those hesitant to dip their toes in the cool waters of pixellated piracy, this could be a good place to begin.
I know I've picked on Nintendo a lot in this post—and they definitely deserve it, really—but this anti-consumer behaviour is part of the entire video game industry and the broader media landscape. It is, as they say, “a feature, not a bug.”
And again, I'm not here to say that you should steal everything ever made. Creating things takes a lot of work and I believe work has intrinsic value, but once the work is done and compensated, and the money has been made for the studio that produced the game, it's just not fair to keep expecting more without offering anything new. Even parasites give up when the host is dead.
So here is what I plan to do. It's not advice, but you're certainly allowed to follow suit:
Rent games from major IP series as well as remakes of older games from the library
Whenever possible, buy copies of indie games. Support small devs and help foster alternative business models.
Donate to game developers via patronage platforms or crowdfunding campaigns.
If buying games outright, buy physical copies; from local, independent stores whenever possible. Give those games away, loan them to friends, and even sell them at a fair price when they are no longer needed.
Emulate: explore the wonderful world of homebrew games, fan translations, and fan-made games. Play without guilt or remorse and without owning expensive physical copies.
Fight copyright overreach and protect media preservation
And of course, have fun.
Recommendations
Back in August, I recommended an interview with Metalabel co-founder, Austin Robey and gave a brief nod to his new project, Subvert. At the time this was a pre-launch project, but now it has officially opened its doors.
Subvert is an artist- and user-run cooperative alternative to Bandcamp whose goal is to become the Mondragon of media. It’s a lofty goal, but Austin is committed to the vision of cooperative economics, and I couldn’t be more excited to see where this goes.
To become a member, head over to subvert.fm, purchasing of a physical, limited edition zine is the dues for becoming a consumer member. Artists and labels can join for free.
In thinking about how to make my argument for this piece, I read countless other articles and watched many videos arguing similarly in favour of emulation. I even read the counter-arguments. But it was the history of emulation that influenced me the most. Here’s a great video I found that covers some of this little-known history.
Finally, I want to leave you with a case for media preservation from the media preservation experts at the Internet Archive. Written in the lead up to the DDoS attack, the report makes reference to it, and it’s implications, thusly:
The public often takes for granted the availability of digital resources, expecting them to be accessible with only a click. But what happens when that access is severed? When a library goes offline, it doesn’t just interrupt research; it stifles educational progress, halts public access to information, and, in a new and chilling way, creates gaps in the public memory.
That last line really stuck with me, and this is just from the preface! I definitely recommend reading the entire report.
Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record
In today's digital landscape, corporate interests, shifting distribution models, and malicious cyber attacks are threatening public access to our shared cultural history. The rise of streaming platforms and temporary licensing agreements means that sound recordings, books, films, and other cultural artifacts that used to be owned in physical form, are now at risk-in digital form-of disappearing from public view without ever being archived.
I’ll leave you with that.
Until next time,
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