UPDATE
It looks like the owner of RomUniverse has did himself more damage. After his comments on bringing the website back with ROMs, Nintendo was able to get a bit win during a legal battle. The court ruled that all illegally obtained ROMs owned by the individual to be destroyed. Not only will they have to remove all the ROMs that they own, they are ordered to not obtain any new files.
Original Story…
Nintendo is incredibly protective over its line of IPs. It’s not unheard of at all when it comes to Nintendo going after pirates to fans that make up content purely from their passion or fandom. It’s quite the problem for players that hope to enjoy some of those fan games that looked appealing and it’s also been problematic for players that hoped to enjoy some of the earlier video game installments that are not available through modern hardware platforms that Nintendo has put out.
ROMs have been around for ages. It’s essentially a digital format of old video game titles and it’s proven to be popular for a range of devices. Players could easily set up their PC to play a wide range of past video game console platforms with a slew of video game titles that made the console such a big hit back in the day. Naturally, Nintendo was one of the companies that had several emulators and ROMs readily available online. The setup process was easy and finding copies of games that were released decades ago was not hard to come across at all.
That’s since changed with Nintendo going hard on ROM hosting websites. Since then, there’s been a mass deletion of Nintendo-based ROMs from the internet. You’ll have a bit harder time coming across these games and it’s partly due to Nintendo’s legal attack against RomUniverse. Matthew Storman was fined $2.15 million for hosting a website with Nintendo ROMs which resulted in a $50 a month payment to Nintendo.
It would seem that Matthew has already missed the first payment and he also has an interest in bringing the website back online. However, the website would remove Nintendo-based content and only feature ROMs from other platforms. That might bring out more legal attacks, with Nintendo already going against this idea. It should be interesting to see what the latest court ruling has to say about this. Regardless, for some games that can’t be picked up regularly today or enjoyed through modern platforms and digital storefronts, ROMs can act not only as a means to enjoy this game but also as a way to preserve the title.
Source: PC Gamer
Source Update: VGC
