Basically, if you want their service, you need a $300 hardware dongle.Īnd even then, the (licenses for) the old games that you're buying from Nintendo's service are actually licenses to the particular port that runs on whatever the console generation you buy them on. but only on other new(er) Nintendo consoles: a physical product you must first buy from them. Nintendo has a service that lets you play old Nintendo games. 'Digital' is an interesting distinction here. Without those crackers cracking the game, we might never have found a copy that we could have published. So we ended up including the cracked version, with the cracks, and just initializing the games to a memory state just after the crack intro played. But of course the crackers had included crack intros which we certainly couldn't use. Well, fortunately, the 1980s demo scene had led to cracked copies of these games being easily downloaded (bonus fun fact: I may be the only person in history who clicked 'agree' on a 'you must have written permission from the publisher to download this ROM' and meant it). And several of these old systems had some form of copy protection.

According to the internal rumor mill, some of these companies required us to convince them that they really were the owners of these games do to a long series of acquisitions before they'd agree to sell us the rights to the games.Īnyway, once we had the rights, we of course asked for a copy of the game. Our lawyers went out and hunted down the owners of old Commodore 64 titles and such. Way back in the day, I worked for a company that created a 'play old videogames' service.

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