 So, Emu Paradise, a very popular ROM website, a site that I've used in the past when I used to, key thing there, used to emulate games, has changed their policies after 18 years. And no, this isn't because Nintendo or any other company contacted them and made any direct threats to them and their website. However, it is due to the actions Nintendo has taken against other ROM sites. I'm going to read this article by Kotaku, full credit to them, link down in the description because they're the people that I got this news from. And it says, Emu Paradise, one of the world's longest running and most popular emulator communities, announced today in the face of recent legal action against pirate sites. This has to do with Nintendo. It will be changing. In effect, ceasing to offer ROM versions of Nintendo's and any other company's old classics. The site founder, known as MASJ, said this, it's not worth it for us to risk potentially disastrous consequences. I cannot in good conscience risk the futures of our team members who have contributed to the site through the years. We run Emu Paradise for the love of retro games and for you to be able to revisit those good times. Unfortunately, it's not possible right now to do so in a way that makes everyone happy and keeps us out of trouble. Then Kotaku said that Emu Paradise has been running since 2000 and it's a good bet many of you have visited the site from time to time. It's easily one of the most popular ROM and emulator destinations online to download a classic game from your childhood that you felt catching up with again. While the site isn't technically closing down, it is ceasing to distribute ROMs of other people's games. And then MASJ went on to say, thus we have decided to make a new start. We will continue to be passionate retro gamers and we will keep doing cool stuff around retro games. But you won't be able to get your games from here for now. Where we go with this is up to us and up to you. There you have it folks. Emu Paradise, one of the most popular ROM sites in the world, is no longer going to be carrying ROMs of retro games that are made by other people, doesn't mean they won't have any games that maybe their own team has made. But yeah. This is kind of in reaction to Jacob Mathias who owned love ROMs. And if the court decides in Nintendo's favor, he could lose millions of dollars. Now he doesn't have millions of dollars so I don't know what would ultimately end up happening if he would just make payments, if he would serve jail time. I'm not exactly sure where it would end up or what the settlement agreement could be if Nintendo says, look, we're not going to go after millions, but we do want a significant chunk of money. We settle this outside of court. We don't really know what's going to happen because Nintendo was within the illegal rights to file a lawsuit against Jacob Mathias, owner of love ROMs. For those who don't know that story, Jacob Mathias has a pending lawsuit from Nintendo for various amounts of money based on Nintendo ROMs that were on his website and Nintendo assets being used on his website. And there was not just the ROMs of sales, but any train marks and copyrights used and all that stuff. And because of that, love ROM shut down. And that's no surprise, but, you know, it doesn't mean that Nintendo's dropped the case. In fact, Nintendo, according to court records, anyways, is going forward with the case and the idea here is to do exactly, I think, what is happening now. Nintendo in the past has gone after ROM sites and issued cease and desist letters to many of them. And basically all those ROM sites just comply and remove Nintendo's ROMs. But this is a different beast because Nintendo has never gone after a ROM site and an owner of a ROM site directly with a lawsuit for millions of dollars. They've never done that before. It's a new precedent currently being set and it certainly looks like Nintendo as well within their legal right to go after this precedent. Now, whether the amounts of money they can go after per infringement, per game, per trademark, per copyright is going to be upheld in the court of law. I don't know. We don't know what the actual numbers are going to be agreed upon by the court on what the valuation for each of those things is, but that's neither here nor there. It's going to be a significant penalty likely for the owner of love ROMs. And as much as it sucks for that person, this is what Nintendo wanted to happen. This is why Nintendo did it. Nintendo did it so other websites like Emu Paradise would be scared. They want these websites to go away through the fear that Nintendo is no longer just going to issue cease and desist anymore. They're going to come after you and they're going to come after you hard and it's going to financially ruin you. And this is why Emu Paradise is being proactive. And instead of just getting rid of Nintendo, they just don't want to risk it at all. They don't want any other company because what's going to happen if and when Nintendo wins this lawsuit, other companies are going to look at it as, hey, so we can go after these websites and make tons of money doing it. So why the hell not? So they're looking at it as Nintendo is setting a new precedent. Other companies might follow it. We need to get out of this game right now before it happens to us. And yeah, I mean, that's that's the general distance here. So Nintendo's goal is currently being achieved in scaring away popular ROM sites from existing. Now, as for my two cents on this, I think that ROM sites there, there's a point to existence for ROM sites. And the main argument that I partially agree with is the preservation of video games. We do not have currently any way that video games are preserved, especially in their original state. Even when Nintendo's brought games back to the NES classic, the SNES classic as great as the emulators are as great as the ROMs are, you really don't get the original CRT experience, the CRT filter they have on there is not really true to the way CRT works. And you can get, you know, more true to life CRT filters and effects through certain other emulators. So I don't know if the original source code has necessarily gone for it, but the ability to play it in its original form pretty much is unless you happen to own a physical copy. That still works. So it's it's very, and I'll say, obviously, I happen to have a working CRTV. Those are actually becoming less and less common. They don't make them anymore. So there's that. I think that when you look at this thing on the whole, I I'm just I I don't know where to stand because I am against piracy. Anyone who's pirating the games, you know, never bought them, never owned a copy. I'm just against it. But if you've owned a copy, if you own several copies and you just want to play it on your computer, you want to try out emulators, you want to try out modifications, it's hard for me to really be angry with you. I mean, I'm against obviously piracy of things like switch games, like the current generation systems. Obviously, you can't like, no, don't be using those ROMs, but the goal of this is about retro gaming. And Nintendo has done a poor job, you know, we know this for a fact, because Nintendo, one of the games they released on the virtual console in the past, a copy of it, it was discovered in the source code was actually a ROM. They downloaded off a website. So Nintendo use the website to recover their own data. This lets you know how poorly that even large companies like Nintendo are maintaining, you know, that old data. Now, that doesn't mean Nintendo couldn't, you know, fork over the money on eBay, buy a copy of the of the game if they don't have one in-house and rip the code themselves. Of course they could, but they saved time and just downloaded it off the internet. And so Nintendo is taking advantage of stuff like this, even though they don't need to. I I think what needs to happen, at least for video game preservation purposes, is we need to get away from ROM sites. We need to get away from allowing people to freely download this stuff, because I think that's where Nintendo has a problem. Nintendo still sells a lot of these games. Yes, I realize they're not necessarily selling them on Switch. They do sell a lot of these games on Wii U, on 3DS, they sold a bunch of them on Wii and DS. Obviously we have the classic systems, but Nintendo is still repackaging and reselling a lot of these games. And if other companies are starting to do the same thing, they can obviously leave other legal issues. I think that the best way to do this is for Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft, you know, major indie studios, Bethesda, Activision, 2K, all these companies to kind of get together and form a coalition, sort of like the ESRB, but instead this coalition is about video game preservation. And then the idea is they could all come together to form a museum that's all about the preservation of the video games. So one copy of every game that's ever been released, goes to that museum, has its data dumped, stored on servers. People can visit the museum and play those games in their original forms at that museum. And thus we know the data itself is there. It's fully recovered. There will obviously be server backups, all that stuff. You can take a look at the physical cartridge if you really, really want. Maybe you don't have a working system that are played in, or maybe you do have a working system to play in for those who want to experience it, but that would be after you've obviously dumped all the code. And I feel like that is what needs to happen for really the justification for ROM sites to just go away in general. Because for video game preservation purposes, we just need to know that these games are not gone forever. I mean, obviously for our own purposes, you know, you could argue, oh, well, I want to play a game for my childhood and I can't find it anymore. I understand that, but that's not about video game preservation. That's about you just wanting to reach back into your childhood and experience something you experience back then. And it's a warming feeling. It's an understanding feeling, but that's not video game preservation. Video game preservation is about not losing games forever. And this has happened. There are games that are lost to time. There are games that you will never find again because it wasn't preserved. And this is going to be even more true to in today's world with all the indie games. They'll literally be indie games that didn't sell well, that nobody backed up and that the indie developer goes into business, ends up wiping their drives and we never, ever see that indie game again. And I mean, it makes it even more complicated, obviously for video game preservation purposes. But I think of all these companies came together and formed a coalition like they did with the ESRB and obviously the company behind that. I think that you would find a lot more common ground in protecting these video games while not, you know, making it so ROM sites need to exist in order to protect them. Because right now no one in the world can afford to be the keeper of video game history. They can't. It's an expensive endeavor to go through and dump ROMs of every single video game that's ever existed in the history of mankind. It's such a time seeing process. Someone could spend several lifetimes doing it and not pull it off. But if companies come together, you have a paid organization, a collective museum, whether it's located in the US or any other country, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that it exists. And obviously you have all the different versions of the game backed up. If there's language differences or graphic differences, I think that that could be the best way to deal with this. So yes, go after the ROM sites. But in doing that, also form a coalition to make sure these games are preserved. So we have the peace of mind. I have the peace of mind to know, look, if Nintendo ever does want to bring back a game that maybe they don't have the code for anymore at their headquarters from for some ungodly reading. Maybe hardware decoration or something. They have an actual file of it. They can reach out to me like, look, we obviously help fund this organization. We're going to pull our file, you know, get a copy of it and re-release it and everything will be all good. I think that's the best way to go about this. And that would take care of the video game preservation reasons. As for the not wanting to pay for games, can't find these games, I get it. I understand it. But ultimately, it is technically illegal. If you don't own a copy of that game, you didn't dump the ROM yourself, you're doing something illegal when you download that ROM. And until the laws change, we kind of have to abide by them. That's just my two thoughts on that. Anyways, I've talked a lot about ROMs and emulation on Nintendo Prime, and I know you might say my opinion. Slow flop time and time. This is kind of been my general feeling. I've done this stuff before. I stopped doing it because it is against the law. And I don't want to break the law. I don't want to get in trouble. I don't want to risk a lawsuit like Nintendo. I'm not running a ROM site, but when's it going to stop there? You know, what's stopping Nintendo from finding out that, you know, X person has a whole bunch of illegally downloaded ROMs sitting on their computer. All it takes is them finding out and they can come after that person as well because they could do it under the premise of possession with intent to distribute, kind of like they do with drugs. So I don't know. That's my two cents. You guys, let me know what you think about this whole situation down in the comments below. I am Nathaniel Ruffeljantz from Nintendo Prime. And if you like this video, you know what to do. And if you dislike the video, it's all right. If that dislike button, subscribe for more content and I'll catch you in the next one.