Life after death: keeping the games, the hardware, and the style alive

Nintendo of America produced new NES consoles until 1995, while the Famicom, the Super Famicom, and the FDS were produced in Japan until 2003; the company stopped offering repair consoles for any of the consoles in 2007. That's a pretty remarkable multi-decade run no matter how you slice it. But that was hardly the end of the line for the 8-bit powerhouse, though—both the fans and Nintendo itself have kept the Famicom's game library alive well into the present day.

It started with independently developed emulators. In the late '90s and early 2000s, as physical NES hardware and software became more difficult to find, some enthusiasts turned to the increasingly affordable, increasingly powerful computers on their desks to play old software. A crudely named program called NESticle was one of the earliest free NES emulators to achieve playability for a wide variety of games. It helped to launch an emulation scene that has produced playable emulators for dozens of consoles since.

In the early days, emulators like NESticle and Zsnes mostly concentrated on making as many retail games as playable as possible. Both then and now, while the emulators themselves are legal as long as they don't include proprietary code (like the BIOS files needed to boot the original PlayStation, for example), obtaining games to play on them has always been a legal grey area at best. Downloading these games (usually called ROMs after the read-only memory chips they were first ripped from) without owning a physical copy of the game is definitely illegal. Even if you own a "backup copy" of the actual cartridge, a ROM may be illegal unless you ripped it yourself.

In more recent years, as computers have gotten even faster and cheaper, some third-party emulators have come to value emulation accuracy as much as, if not more than, playability. Byuu, the developer behind the Super Famicom emulator bsnes, gave us some insight into that world a couple of years ago. To these developers, preserving accurate emulators is an issue of archiving and preserving gaming's heritage just as much as it is about playing A Boy and his Blob on your MacBook.

"Take a look at Nintendo's Game and Watch hardware," Byuu wrote. "These devices debuted in 1980, and by now most of the 43 million produced have failed due to age or have been destroyed. Although they are still relatively obtainable, their scarcity will only increase, as no additional units will ever be produced. This same problem extends to any hardware: once it's gone, it's gone for good. At that point, emulators are the only way to experience those old games, so they should be capable of doing so accurately."

Especially in the last console generation, emulation went from being a way for hackers and maybe-pirates to get their old-school fix to being a relatively inexpensive way for gaming's older companies to milk their back catalogs. Nintendo in particular has proven only too willing to sell you your childhood over and over again via its Virtual Console emulation service, which it seems to re-launch every time it creates a new system. In North America, a total of 93 NES games are available on the original Wii's virtual console (and the Wii U, playing in Wii Mode); only 27 are available on the 3DS, only 19 are available on the Wii U. Games available on all three must be purchased three separate times if you want to own them on all the devices.

If you still have old cartridges laying around and don't want to track down an original console to play them on, the expiration of most of Nintendo's NES patents means that building and selling NES-compatible third-party systems is no longer the dubious activity it once was. These consoles, sometimes referred to as "Famiclones," sometimes boast compatibility with both NES and Famicom cartridges, as well as Super Nintendo and Genesis carts in certain cases. However, they use newer chips meant to simulate the original consoles' rather than carbon copies of the originals, which tends to cause compatibility problems. Later and more complicated Famicom titles like Castlevania III tend to give these systems trouble, and gamers looking for an authentic old-school fix would still be better off tracking down an original console.

Even discounting the people developing actual NES-compatible hardware and software, developers for newer systems pay homage to the NES all the time. Some games, like Capcom's Mega Man 9 and 10, are painstaking in their devotion to the original console's aesthetic. Retro City Rampage creator Brian Provinciano went so far as to create a version of his game that actually works under the NES' strict hardware limitations. Indie developers like Adam Rippon and ZeBoyd, on the other hand, merely draw inspiration for games like Dragon Fantasy and Breath of Death VII from the NES and Famicom era.

The kids who played the NES have all grown up, and a whole bunch of them are ignoring the exponentially more powerful hardware capabilities of modern consoles in favor of the systems they cut their teeth on. Maybe in a few years the generation that came of age playing the Nintendo 64 and the original PlayStation will bring blurry textures, rampant jaggies, and disc switching back into vogue. For now, 8-bit and 16-bit nostalgia is decidedly in fashion.

So happy birthday, Famicom! For a 30-year-old, you're still looking pretty good.

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