A visit to a retro game shop changed my views on emulation

This year I had the pleasure of meeting my Android Authority Colleagues for the first time at MWC. After a long day at the conference center, Hadlee and I did what all self-respecting nerds do: We looked up some local retro game stores.

Given, with two children and a mortgage loan, I was just a window trade. But while Hadlee was out of spending his adult money on the best games from yesterday World DowerI decided to chat with the owner about his thoughts of emulation. There was no retroid or anbernic handheld yeast between obscure Japanese Famicom games and binders of used Nintendo DS cassettes, but I wanted to grab the rise of these Modern emulation handheld.

To my surprise, he was nowhere near in contrast to emulation that I had imagined. In fact, he came some excellent points that changed my views on the entire industry.

As a millennium, I have a complicated relationship with piracy. Peer-to-peer downloads revolutionized the way people consume media and made it easier than ever to get some games in history.

But when I discovered emulation in the late 90’s, I largely wanted to look at Snow Play I grew up with. As a child, I had to call my father to beat the hard levels, and at one point his skills did not cut it (I look at you, the Lion King). Save States changed all that. I have good memories of games on my noisy gateway 2000 PC, but it’s a good example of retro-tech that I don’t want to see make a comeback.

Although it was a formative experience for my early game years, I mostly left emulation for a few decades after that. I whipped away my teens and organized High School Halo tournaments before finally returning to Retro Gaming in recent years as a dad player. And wow, get things changed.

Today, Emulation-handled you to play about about any retro games on the market, and they often send with thousands of pre-loaded rooms. This is definitely illegal, although society is largely facing the blind eye for the practice.

But talking to the owner of a retro game shop, whose livelihood is directly related to selling physical copies of the same games, made me think of things in another light. Do these emulation of handheld hand in his market cuts? Does he see emulation as direct competition?

Well, the answer to that is a resounding no.

While the owner (I didn’t get his name, unfortunately) prefers to play on original retro systems, he’s not against emulation. In fact, he thinks it has had a positive impact on retro games as a whole, since it helped people find out if games they would otherwise never have played.

Furthermore, he revealed that most of his customers also mimic games – even those they buy from him. Most are collectors who buy the games and show them on a shelf. Playing them can damage the cassette, and emulation provides many other benefits such as Save States, improved frames, etc.

After thinking about it, it describes me too. Although I no longer have the drive to collect old games (just kidding, I am broke), one of my most valued assets is a Snes cartridge of the Earthbound with the strategy guide, complete with disgusting scratch-and-sniff cards on the back. I have since played Earthbound on both Nintendo Switch Online and Emulation Handhelds, but have never even wanted to break out my old snows.

In other words, emulation has actually grown its market. Whether playing their favorites or finding new games on questionable means, it creates a smooth pipeline of people interested in retro games. They then look for a way to contact the hobby by collecting physical games and other memorabilia from stores like his.

Above all, he emphasized that what is most important is just to enjoy games. Whether it is by blasting a minifridge size CRT and blowing the dust off your favorite cartridge or sprite a microSD card in a Game Boy clone, does it for the love of the game. It’s a feeling we can all come behind.