Nintendo has been embroiled in legal trouble this year. In other words, it ends up absorbing the whole plane, big enough to block out the sun, and hurtles toward your apartment with a metallic scream, sort of like Katamari Damacy. And concrete. where was i? Ah, that’s right.
Chasing Palworld and taking nearly 20 years worth of Garry’s mod items out of the Steam Workshop, Citra and Yuzu drop elbows, grab a chair from the announcer’s table, and slam it over the head of Palworld to Pokémon Mods . What’s scary is that Valve pre-emptively ignored the N64 Portal remake in case the Disney of video games decided to go through the expensive and legal hassles. Everything I just listed is as of 2024, and by the way, the list goes on.
Anyway, Switch emulator Ryujinx is the latest emulator to be told to either work out or sleep with the fish, and its creator was quick to comply with the legal request. But as if to add insult to injury, Nintendo now appears to have set up shop in the Ryujinx domain name (thanks, Gamesradar).
As spotted on the emulator’s subreddit, whois.com identifies Nintendo of America Inc. as a registered contact for Ryujinx.org. The site was updated on November 7th, but there’s a good chance the company swooped in and published it sooner.
Ryujinx domain officially owned by Nintendo (via r/Ryujinx)
(Even though it occasionally acquires emulators to run things that are on display in Nintendo’s official museum) It’s very likely they’re just doing this to further silence the prankster. The cost of a random domain like the emulator’s previous website is probably just a whisper in the ocean of Nintendo’s annual budget, so it’s easy to get your hands on it.
But it’s kind of morbid, like building a house out of the bones of a freshly killed enemy that no one can enter. This is the latest move to show that the dark ages of game preservation are rapidly approaching, if they haven’t already begun. Last year, it was observed that around 87% of games can only be played through piracy, luck, or physical access to the archive. Research at the time stated:
“Imagine if the only way to watch Titanic was to find used VHS tapes and maintain vintage equipment yourself so you could still watch them. What if even the library couldn’t do more? You could keep the Titanic VHS and digitize it, but you’d have to travel all the way there to see it.”
Unfortunately, given the current state of what companies are and are not required to do to support their games, these efforts will likely rise and fall in an eternal game of whack-a-mole. You’ll probably have to repeat it. Nintendo paraded Gary Bowser around, still in financial debt, as a warning not to push their luck.
