Modern Vintage Gamer just released a video [0] discussing this leak in greater detail along with its expected implications.
Anyone who's curious can find the download links by backtracking through all the Pokemon Prototype General threads under the Pokemon board on 4chan.
One of the leaks that caught my attention was the source for Pokemon Blue, partially because of nostalgia and partially out of curiosity to see what an old game's codebase even looks like. The first thing that stood out to me was the project's flat folder structure, full of hundreds of files; I guess I was expecting things to be a bit more structured. The source is more readable and approachable than I expected, although I've only poked around in some of the more obvious places and definitions. I'd recommend watching The Ultimate Game Boy Talk [1] before trying to dive into any code.
I'm really excited by the Pokemon leak. The game was so large and detailed yet the resulting output so incredibly tiny. The developers implemented so many tricks to keep the size down. Now you can see what they did and how it worked. This could be really historically important.
I have zero experience in the video game industry, but I'd think that since video games get ~zero attention after they're shipped, writing maintainable code is less of a priority.
I'd be really curious to see how the Pokemon Red/Blue split was done. Is it a C precompiler flag? Build config? Actual config? Cloned repo?
In the Pokemon Blue codebase they use 2 flag variables to distinguish between the different games, these are `pokemon_type` and `pokemon_type_blue`. The name of the second flag definitely hints that it was added later in development.
The general pattern for branching between game variations looks like this across the codebase:
ifn pokemon_type
ifn pokemon_type_blue
; blue
else
; red
endif
else
; green
endif
Conditional assembly directives like `ifn` are resolved statically during assembly, so only the code between matching conditions is included as part of the output. To anyone interested in exploring this a bit more, I'd recommend reading Chapter 8 Section 13 of the DOS version of The Art of Assembly Language Programming [0], which starts on page 43 of the linked PDF.
Bonus fun-fact: In the Pokemon Yellow codebase it says `pokemon_type=1` is yellow, while `pokemon_type=0` is pink! This suggests to me that the idea of Pokemon Pink with Jigglypuff as your starter was probably being floated around but it was eventually scrapped. (The only remaining options for a pink starter pokemon with a pink evolution in the original 151 would be Clefairy and Slowpoke, neither of which are very cute.) The idea of Jigglypuff as a starter is further supported by her appearance alongside Pikachu on the roster of the original Super Smash Bros. which seems rather unexpected unless they had bigger plans for her.
In the old days that was probably more true than it is today, since so many games are "as a service" now with shared engines, online platforms, continual updates/patches, tons of expansions and DLC, supporting mods, etc.
The downside is that we'll never really be able to play today's games nostalgically like we can with old burned-to-ROM games.
Online multiplayer games have a shelf life of sorts that depends on the servers being available and having other people to play with. There's a few examples of community-driven projects to revive classic online multiplayer games with mixed success but it'll just never be the same thing.
Well there is always the case of iterative releases of games of a genre. So Pokemon Silver vs Pokemon Blue. It is going to based off of the original source code. So writing maintainable code is desired (from the dev at least).
That’s not my experience of modern games. There are loads of games out right now that get patches constantly, sometimes even weekly. It’s not just multiplayer games; lots of roguelikes are in constant development as well.
I might be wrong but it would make sense to me that the second gen games (Gold/Silver) would share a far bit of code from the first gen (Red/Blue/Yellow). In that sense in this case, the code did infant live longer than the release of the first game.
Maybe relevant, but Pokemon Blue is part of the American release, which came quite a while after the original Japanese release of Green (both had a red). They had to rework some things to handle English. It wouldn't surprise me if that contributed somewhat to a less ordered structure in that it's an alteration of the original.
Is the reason for the flat structure saving space? I know on older games, space is at a premium and referencing files from the root might save some bytes so maybe that's the reason due to shorter file reference names.
It was way more common to simply not attempt to organize projects in this way "BITD" - it complicates your build system because now it has to manage paths, which entangles it with the OS file system. Not every file system even has subdirectories and not every tool acknowledges or agrees upon how to use them, so depending on how antiquated their dev environment was, it may have been totally impractical.
This was probably development environment limitations. You have to remember that this game was released in 96, which means it was probably developed on a command-line machine with an IDE like Turbo C.
I wouldn't be surprised. As I understood it, just translating the game into English was a problem because there's more characters to cram in the cartridge.
It wasn't Nintendo's CVS it was BroadOn's CVS. It was a third party Chinese company Nintendo allowed to produce Nintendo compatible hardware in China. They had access to a bunch of sdks and the source codes for the system to develop their hardware.
To be clear, this doesn't just contain the source code of the software. It also contains the Verilog for the N64 GPU and other important hardware component, which is hugely important. From what I gather, it also contains full version history from their VCS.
While it is very interesting, it's worth noting that anybody hoping to use this for anything "serious" risks getting the Nintendo lawyers on their ass. Emulators won't touch this, neither will console clones. This leak is both a blessing and a curse.
> it's worth noting that anybody hoping to use this for anything "serious" risks getting the Nintendo lawyers on their ass. Emulators won't touch this, neither will console clones.
How about historians writing about Nintendo's development process by referencing the VCS history? Would they get in trouble?
It's a bit of shame, too, because from what I gather, the N64 has a bit of an atypical architecture[1] that's made it hard to get the same quality of emulation that the game cube and wii have. It doesn't have a straight up and down GPU, it has what it calls a reality processing unit, that does graphics and sound. And it can be reconfigured with cartridge specific microcode? It's getting into the weeds on hardware design and I'm not experienced enough to have a strong opinion on the matter.
The N64 emulation scene has always been heavily drama filled, going back at least 20 years to the original Oman archives. While the system architecture is bizarre, that's fine, we can cope with that. It's always just been a very toxic social space that has pushed a lot of the more talented emulator developers away.
As someone who is in "emulation-adjacent" communities, just yesterday I ran into a giant new pocket of N64 drama I was previously unaware of.
I don't support this action from the leakers but clearly there is a large amount of interest in this information.
Now would be the time for Nintendo to seriously consider open sourcing some of this stuff so they have a chance to put it out there legally and in a way that benefits them, instead of the current situation where it only benefits shady outfits selling aftermarket raspberry pis loaded with illegal ROMs, that were never going to partner with them anyway.
> Now would be the time for Nintendo to seriously consider open sourcing some of this stuff
Unfortunately, Nintendo has never done anything like this. Maybe some reputable organization like a computing museum could ask them to place this information in escrow in the Internet Archive, so that it can be released "properly" after copyrights expire and trade secrets have long become irrelevant. But there's no way they're going to do more than that.
Couldn't an emulator use a module as the core, and leave it up to the user to find the 'illegal' emulator core and use it? Kind of like how you need a copyrighted BIOS or ROM to use certain emulators, but of course those files can't be distributed with the emulator.
I like drawing metaphors from Tamiya. Tamiya is a Japanese scale modelling and remote-controlled vehicle company with a loooong history of making quality products that the industry just eats up. Like Nintendo, Tamiya has always been in the back row when it comes to technological innovation, but lead the pack when it came to functionality, reliability, and quality. Just like Nintendo, there are Tamiya fan clubs where people are enthusiastic about products from this one company. The rest of the industry doesn't exist to them. I'm trying to illustrate how Tamiya is to the R/C world what Nintendo is to console games.
That said, vintage Tamiya products new in original packaging from the 70s and 80s can sell for thousands and thousands of dollars. Simple plastic and aluminum parts that were consumable in the 80s were selling for hundreds of dollars in the late 2000s. The market was a rough place. I have about a dozen antique Tamiya models, so I was one of those people engaged in bidding wars for 1/4" long tie-rod ends. A brand new Tamiya in the 80s was probably about $100 for a rolling kit. Now people are paying that for individual parts. Nobody was having fun with their models anymore. Everyone was just dusting them off and spending money keeping them pretty.
Tamiya had to get the kids playing with their models again. They had to take this exclusive, elitist market they created by accident 30 years ago and start making money off of it again.
So Tamiya re-released nearly ALL of their vintage kits. Brand new, with original design, documentation, decals, and packaging. This was in addition to their new models and high-tech racing vehicles which were still being released on a regular schedule at the same time. Initially all the collectors (myself included) were livid, because for a while it meant my $1,100 Bruiser 3-speed was only worth $500. That didn't happen either. For a time the prices dipped significantly, but collectors still demanded vintage parts to repair their vintage models. The prices soon stabilized. Now that market is healthy and stable, vintage vehicles can be repaired cheaply if desired, and collectors can still spend thousands on NIB models.
If Nintendo embraced their market they could possibly reap the same benefits. The enthusiasm for their products is there. Tamiya has shown it is possible to separate collector demand from commodity demand and still have those ecosystems thrive side-by-side. I think Nintendo could pull that off as well.
I doubt it, Nintendo had huge success from the NES classic precisely because of their absurdly protective attitudes towards old games. They've managed to retain some level of serious value onto 35 year old games in an industry where many games are being given away for next to nothing within a few years of release.
I think they've pushed the NES stuff about as far as they possibly can and the NES classic was something of a final cash grab from those games, but they can absolutely still bleed some value from SNES onwards.
As far as that Tamiya model is concerned, surely Nintendo are doing about as close to that as they can within their medium with Link's Awakening on Switch? It's close to the exact same game, released at a price comparable to the original release, but with technological updates to make up for where the original would no longer match up?
Case in point: it was Dreamcast's ability to be hacked and run CD-ROMs illegitimately which probably killed it.
"Open Source Video Game Hardware" is a misnomer. Video game developers (ie: EA or Activision) demand DLC and DRM models to extract more money out of "whale" video game players. A leak like this harms the #1 customer of a console: the 3rd party developers.
Even if a console is a hit with consumers (ie: Dreamcast), if it is opened up for easy piracy and loses DRM protections, the 3rd party developers will stay away, killing the platform.
--------
For a more modern example, consider Ouya vs Android vs iPhone. The locked down "walled garden" DRM model wins for developers, even if it loses on consumer freedom.
Nintendo is still getting value from the NES and SNES with their online program as well. The membership is $20/yr and one of the very few things it includes is an emulator with a few dozen games from each system.
One of my dreams was always if Nintendo released "development diary" editions of old titles(in particular Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time) where you'd get to try out a playable showcase of the game's builds at particular states in development from very early initial tests, to Alpha, Beta, various trade conference demos etc. Each with developer commentary, perhaps design sketches, deleted content and maybe maybe also some source code.
Essentially like what's pretty much standard for special edition BluRays. Pack that in a nice hardcover booklet and people would eat it up.
I really enjoy reading about some of the techniques the developers use to get the most out of the hardware. Here are some of my favorites from recent memory:
Valve did this for a number of their games (e.g. Portal, Half Life 2). You can play the game in a developer commentary mode, where (iirc) "orbs" that play recorded audio commentary are littered throughout the regular game world.
Wait - so I can finally buy the Monster Beetle I dearly wanted as a 14 year old?
I imagine the modern iterations are significantly better than those I drooled over as a child, with 30 odd years of improvements in electric motors and batteries?
Yes and no. You can still buy a NiMH battery and a silver can brushed 540 motor if you want too. The price on that stuff has come down significantly. It's the LiPo batteries and brushless motors that cost all the money these days. Then again, they really are in a different league as far as performance and runtime. Back in the day of crystal radios if you wanted to go 50+ MPH you either had to have a nitro engine or you just had a 9T motor that killed your battery in 3 minutes.
Today's electric cars have aaaaalmost made nitro obsolete... not only from a reliability standpoint (like always) but from a performance standpoint as well. Obviously the market for nitro fun will always exist, but if you're just looking for performance these days there is no benefit nitro has over electric anymore.
This is a very cool story, and makes me want to learn more about Tamiya. But the situation does not seem the same to me. People are - for the most part - able to play the old Nintendo games they want through the virtual console, backwards compatibility, remakes, or NES/SNES mini.
Yes, some N64 carts are selling for thousands on eBay - but that’s not preventing kids from playing that game if they want to.
The virtual console is exactly how Nintendo lost faith with loyal consumers who want to stay above board. They sold them on the Wii and many fans bought in - but their purchases were not maintained with their digital account for a Wii U update, instead they had to physically transfer them. So far, just annoyances though.
The real problem came when they shipped the Switch with no virtual console at all. It's obviously easy to run NES and SNES games on even the cheapest modern hardware, so there's no excuse for not letting consumers own and play their games on any Nintendo console.
And maybe they just don't think it's worth spending time on shipping their old games, that it wouldn't be profitable? That would be fair enough, but they are spending time - they just released a whole batch of NES / SNES games to push their online subscription service. Of course, you don't get them just by owning them before - you have to buy them again.
It would have been easy to get and keep the good will of long-time loyal fans with a persistent and growing platform of their classic titles, but Nintendo opted for short-term investments instead of long-term in this case.
To the OP's point, You can play some games with virtual console, but many games were released on only one or two newer consoles so you would effectively need to spend hundreds and sometimes thousands in order to actually play them all legally.
What financial damage does this do when Nintendo no longer manufacturers this console or actively developers for it and hasn't for years, or a decade in the N64/GameCube's case?
Well, they'll always oversell the damage, but realistically, not much impact to their bottom line. They do release remasters and ports, but I'd be hard pressed to see it being a significant loss in the grand scheme of things for a company that doesn't need to subsidize hardware with software. Like: people would buy a hypothetical N64 mini regardless of 3rd party emulators available. Or buy old games on the Virtual Console or however it's now called on the Switch.
From enthusiast perspective - it's a boon for preservation purposes.
> From enthusiast perspective - it's a boon for preservation purposes.
Sort of. It's obviously illegal to distribute, and arguably using it as a reference for re-implementation in emulators or in hardware would be a derivative work, and so also illegal. This could make things harder for emulator and hardware developers who now have to screen new contributors to ensure they have not been exposed to this material. It will probably be a fantastic resource 5-10+ years down the line, when things have cooled off, but for now, it's all fairly radioactive for people and organizations that are concerned about legal action.
Legal always claims losses in the billions, then accounting files the 10-K form and its de minimus and doesn't even show up in the financials.
This has happened in historical "hacking" cases. I remember one phone phreaking case from years ago against AT&T where the highly non-technical and non-accounting judge was convinced by the plaintiff that the defendant caused something like a billion dollars of lost revenue to AT&T and the defense argument against that damage claim revolved around securities fraud because AT&T didn't mention a billion dollar loss in their 10-K nor did they file an emergency 8-K
Sure they still sell old games on through their retro console but these can be pirated easily on existing consoles.
This wouldn’t affect the bottom line really at all since this will not make piracy easier.
The only possible loss here is due to fines from regulators or law suits from 3rd parties which had their licenses IP exposed but the latter would be a hard thing to prove or estimate it would be hard to claim that 25-30 year old SGI IP would be that valuable to their competitors today especially since SGI is dead and who knows who owns that IP right now.
I guess they can make the argument that it will damage their financial prospects of reselling old games on digital platforms, such as Virtual Console.
But emulators are already available with very good accuracy so I don't know if this will actually have any actual impact on their potential sales.
I do believe that N64 emulation might benefit from the leaks, as I am under the impression the accuracy of N64 emulators has some glaring issues still.
Several legacy Mario titles are expected to be released this year on Nintendo Switch's online subscription service. (Galaxy, Sunshine, Mario 64 is the rumor. The NES and SNES titles are already available and this stuff is driving monthly subscription fees)
It could be mildly bad if someone discovers Nintendo devs were like Disney animators and sneaked in "sex" (The Lion King), a drawn penis (The Little Mermaid), or a topless woman (The Rescuers).
If Nintendo offered N64 games to be purchased for the Switch people would still pay for them in droves. It's weird that they don't offer so much of their past works in any legitimate capacity.
It's genuinely weird that they still don't have a virtual console for anything other than a select few NES games. We're midway through the Switch's lifecyle already!
It is illegal, but I do not see it being bad for consumers. If anything it seems that it could be good if it has been done legally from Nintendo instead of being a leak.
This information was actually leaked from a subcontractor, not from Nintendo themselves. It's not clear if Nintendo ever had access to it in its entirety or even knew about it. The subcontractor company is also quite obscure, it's hard to tell how they ended up developing this stuff.
Heh I hope someone finds a way to get reliable (or, for the new generation, any) homebrew on the Switch. The Switch has a built-in browser, Bluetooth and probably a h264 accelerator somewhere in the GPU stack. A proper media player and the ability to easily transfer screenshots via BT would be so awesome.
With many games being outright f2p or very cheap (except AAA titles) I don't get why they all are so uptight about DRM/piracy...
Their copy protection schemes do largely stem from the basic ‘signed personalised tickets’ thing they’ve had going on since the iQue Player and then the Wii, but insofar it seems to have held up to attacks and no fatal fundamental flaws have been found yet. Short of software exploits, until 2048-bit RSA is broken it’s not a concern really
You might be missing the concept of "face" [0]. This is only bad in that it causes Nintendo to lose face, and Nintendo hates losing face. For example, examine Wikipedia; Nintendo's page about legal disputes [1] is whitewashed to reword all of Nintendo's abuses towards Free Software and the public domain as "protection" of Nintendo's "property".
Face allows Nintendo to take their holier-than-thou attitude. It is why they feel that they are allowed to both destroy the community's own work [2][3][4] and steal it for themselves [5][6]. We profess love for Mario, Zelda, Pikachu, and Metroid, and in return, they are socially empowered to abuse us.
Imagine a world where copyright were only 14 years, as in the original, or 2 years, as in my back-of-napkin estimation of how long it takes to publish something and have it fully saturate the world market. In such a world, Nintendo's back catalog would no longer have the force of law behind its monopoly; they would still publish excellent games, but they would not be able to prevent others from enjoying them. Indeed, there is not any reasonable claim to financial damages, just facial damages.
> It is why they feel that they are allowed to both destroy the community's own work [2][3][4] and steal it for themselves [5][6]
You oversold both examples.
2, 3, and 4: That's a hosted(?) emulator distributing, or at least referencing, Nintendo IP, and not in a fair-use context.
You're mildly right about 5 and 6. Nintendo stole the header of ROM files of content that was stolen from Nintendo. The author of the header would have a claim against Nintendo, but seeing how they'd have to explain how the ROM got distributed in the first place, and it's not clear there's enough information in the header for it to be eligible for copyright, I doubt they'd say anything.
5/6 sounds interesting to me. On the one hand Nintendo is the IP holder of the original ROM, so they would be the only ones allowed to legally download it if I understand it correctly. On the other hand the ROM was modified and contains a header which was made by someone else. So, to that part they don't hold the rights to download it? Or is it okay, because it's a derivative of their work?
Just like mp3s cannibalized the music industry. While they did get hard after the lat 90s I would consider routine grwoth year over year to be good. 17 percent in 2017 was considered a bad year
From an archiving perspective, this is incredible. I don't trust corporations, even those as wonderful as Nintendo, to do proper archiving of their systems and release it even 100 years on.
All of their points looks like an attempt to justify bad decisions.
SW-7899-1252-5983 is simpler than username systems children could figure out on Neopets and Club Penguin? People can guess your username because they know your name is Billy?
Discord and Blizzard have the ultimate ez solution: What username do you want? Billy. Alright, if you want someone to find you, give them this string: Billy#1201.
Nintendo still hasn't made an online system as good as Xbox Live in 2002. How they justify SW-7899-1252-5983 as the ideal trade-off sheds some light that they might have an institional-level lack of intuition about what a compelling online experience looks like. Which is interesting because I think most people by now assumed catastrophic indifference.
God I would love to see Mario 64 re-released with a full ray-tracing engine for an Nvidia RTX. The PC port is already there, perhaps with the help of information stolen in this leak.
Readit News
Anyone who's curious can find the download links by backtracking through all the Pokemon Prototype General threads under the Pokemon board on 4chan.
One of the leaks that caught my attention was the source for Pokemon Blue, partially because of nostalgia and partially out of curiosity to see what an old game's codebase even looks like. The first thing that stood out to me was the project's flat folder structure, full of hundreds of files; I guess I was expecting things to be a bit more structured. The source is more readable and approachable than I expected, although I've only poked around in some of the more obvious places and definitions. I'd recommend watching The Ultimate Game Boy Talk [1] before trying to dive into any code.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8G7eq0GlQs
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyzD8pNlpwI
I'd be really curious to see how the Pokemon Red/Blue split was done. Is it a C precompiler flag? Build config? Actual config? Cloned repo?
These are the values for each game:
The general pattern for branching between game variations looks like this across the codebase: Conditional assembly directives like `ifn` are resolved statically during assembly, so only the code between matching conditions is included as part of the output. To anyone interested in exploring this a bit more, I'd recommend reading Chapter 8 Section 13 of the DOS version of The Art of Assembly Language Programming [0], which starts on page 43 of the linked PDF.Bonus fun-fact: In the Pokemon Yellow codebase it says `pokemon_type=1` is yellow, while `pokemon_type=0` is pink! This suggests to me that the idea of Pokemon Pink with Jigglypuff as your starter was probably being floated around but it was eventually scrapped. (The only remaining options for a pink starter pokemon with a pink evolution in the original 151 would be Clefairy and Slowpoke, neither of which are very cute.) The idea of Jigglypuff as a starter is further supported by her appearance alongside Pikachu on the roster of the original Super Smash Bros. which seems rather unexpected unless they had bigger plans for her.
[0] http://www.plantation-productions.com/Webster/www.artofasm.c...
The downside is that we'll never really be able to play today's games nostalgically like we can with old burned-to-ROM games.
Online multiplayer games have a shelf life of sorts that depends on the servers being available and having other people to play with. There's a few examples of community-driven projects to revive classic online multiplayer games with mixed success but it'll just never be the same thing.
https://github.com/pret/pokered
While it is very interesting, it's worth noting that anybody hoping to use this for anything "serious" risks getting the Nintendo lawyers on their ass. Emulators won't touch this, neither will console clones. This leak is both a blessing and a curse.
How about historians writing about Nintendo's development process by referencing the VCS history? Would they get in trouble?
I suppose they wouldn't copy it outright. But wouldn't it be useful as a reference to fix long-standing bugs, improve performance, etc?
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64_technical_specific...
A little bit about their custom N64 GPU microcode is discussed here: https://thesolidstategamer.wordpress.com/2014/07/18/playstat... Edit: Developer interview here https://www.ign.com/articles/1998/02/27/journey-to-the-cente... and much more in-depth technical examination here https://olivieryuyu.blogspot.com/2020/01/introduction-factor...
Factor 5 did so many wild things to the GameCube, they have their own tag on excellent Dolphin blog: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/tags/Factor5/
As someone who is in "emulation-adjacent" communities, just yesterday I ran into a giant new pocket of N64 drama I was previously unaware of.
https://copetti.org/projects/consoles/nintendo-64/
Now would be the time for Nintendo to seriously consider open sourcing some of this stuff so they have a chance to put it out there legally and in a way that benefits them, instead of the current situation where it only benefits shady outfits selling aftermarket raspberry pis loaded with illegal ROMs, that were never going to partner with them anyway.
Unfortunately, Nintendo has never done anything like this. Maybe some reputable organization like a computing museum could ask them to place this information in escrow in the Internet Archive, so that it can be released "properly" after copyrights expire and trade secrets have long become irrelevant. But there's no way they're going to do more than that.
Of course they won't incorporate unlicensed copyrighted things from the leak in their own code, but they don't need to.
Deleted Comment
That said, vintage Tamiya products new in original packaging from the 70s and 80s can sell for thousands and thousands of dollars. Simple plastic and aluminum parts that were consumable in the 80s were selling for hundreds of dollars in the late 2000s. The market was a rough place. I have about a dozen antique Tamiya models, so I was one of those people engaged in bidding wars for 1/4" long tie-rod ends. A brand new Tamiya in the 80s was probably about $100 for a rolling kit. Now people are paying that for individual parts. Nobody was having fun with their models anymore. Everyone was just dusting them off and spending money keeping them pretty.
Tamiya had to get the kids playing with their models again. They had to take this exclusive, elitist market they created by accident 30 years ago and start making money off of it again.
So Tamiya re-released nearly ALL of their vintage kits. Brand new, with original design, documentation, decals, and packaging. This was in addition to their new models and high-tech racing vehicles which were still being released on a regular schedule at the same time. Initially all the collectors (myself included) were livid, because for a while it meant my $1,100 Bruiser 3-speed was only worth $500. That didn't happen either. For a time the prices dipped significantly, but collectors still demanded vintage parts to repair their vintage models. The prices soon stabilized. Now that market is healthy and stable, vintage vehicles can be repaired cheaply if desired, and collectors can still spend thousands on NIB models.
If Nintendo embraced their market they could possibly reap the same benefits. The enthusiasm for their products is there. Tamiya has shown it is possible to separate collector demand from commodity demand and still have those ecosystems thrive side-by-side. I think Nintendo could pull that off as well.
I think they've pushed the NES stuff about as far as they possibly can and the NES classic was something of a final cash grab from those games, but they can absolutely still bleed some value from SNES onwards.
As far as that Tamiya model is concerned, surely Nintendo are doing about as close to that as they can within their medium with Link's Awakening on Switch? It's close to the exact same game, released at a price comparable to the original release, but with technological updates to make up for where the original would no longer match up?
"Open Source Video Game Hardware" is a misnomer. Video game developers (ie: EA or Activision) demand DLC and DRM models to extract more money out of "whale" video game players. A leak like this harms the #1 customer of a console: the 3rd party developers.
Even if a console is a hit with consumers (ie: Dreamcast), if it is opened up for easy piracy and loses DRM protections, the 3rd party developers will stay away, killing the platform.
--------
For a more modern example, consider Ouya vs Android vs iPhone. The locked down "walled garden" DRM model wins for developers, even if it loses on consumer freedom.
Essentially like what's pretty much standard for special edition BluRays. Pack that in a nice hardcover booklet and people would eat it up.
https://medium.com/@gordonnl/wind-waker-graphics-analysis-a0...
https://blog.mecheye.net/2018/03/deconstructing-the-water-ef...
https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2014/03/15/pixel-processing-pro...
I imagine the modern iterations are significantly better than those I drooled over as a child, with 30 odd years of improvements in electric motors and batteries?
Today's electric cars have aaaaalmost made nitro obsolete... not only from a reliability standpoint (like always) but from a performance standpoint as well. Obviously the market for nitro fun will always exist, but if you're just looking for performance these days there is no benefit nitro has over electric anymore.
Yes, some N64 carts are selling for thousands on eBay - but that’s not preventing kids from playing that game if they want to.
The real problem came when they shipped the Switch with no virtual console at all. It's obviously easy to run NES and SNES games on even the cheapest modern hardware, so there's no excuse for not letting consumers own and play their games on any Nintendo console.
And maybe they just don't think it's worth spending time on shipping their old games, that it wouldn't be profitable? That would be fair enough, but they are spending time - they just released a whole batch of NES / SNES games to push their online subscription service. Of course, you don't get them just by owning them before - you have to buy them again.
It would have been easy to get and keep the good will of long-time loyal fans with a persistent and growing platform of their classic titles, but Nintendo opted for short-term investments instead of long-term in this case.
What financial damage does this do when Nintendo no longer manufacturers this console or actively developers for it and hasn't for years, or a decade in the N64/GameCube's case?
From enthusiast perspective - it's a boon for preservation purposes.
Sort of. It's obviously illegal to distribute, and arguably using it as a reference for re-implementation in emulators or in hardware would be a derivative work, and so also illegal. This could make things harder for emulator and hardware developers who now have to screen new contributors to ensure they have not been exposed to this material. It will probably be a fantastic resource 5-10+ years down the line, when things have cooled off, but for now, it's all fairly radioactive for people and organizations that are concerned about legal action.
This has happened in historical "hacking" cases. I remember one phone phreaking case from years ago against AT&T where the highly non-technical and non-accounting judge was convinced by the plaintiff that the defendant caused something like a billion dollars of lost revenue to AT&T and the defense argument against that damage claim revolved around securities fraud because AT&T didn't mention a billion dollar loss in their 10-K nor did they file an emergency 8-K
Emulators and near perfect ones already exist.
Sure they still sell old games on through their retro console but these can be pirated easily on existing consoles.
This wouldn’t affect the bottom line really at all since this will not make piracy easier.
The only possible loss here is due to fines from regulators or law suits from 3rd parties which had their licenses IP exposed but the latter would be a hard thing to prove or estimate it would be hard to claim that 25-30 year old SGI IP would be that valuable to their competitors today especially since SGI is dead and who knows who owns that IP right now.
They would probably sell the console and a bunch of games as a single playable kit.
But emulators are already available with very good accuracy so I don't know if this will actually have any actual impact on their potential sales.
I do believe that N64 emulation might benefit from the leaks, as I am under the impression the accuracy of N64 emulators has some glaring issues still.
And "just" emulation doesn't sell good, even Nintendo just adds it as an additional goody to their online service (NES/SNES).
I believe at least for Nintendo it doesn't really matter much.
It is illegal, but I do not see it being bad for consumers. If anything it seems that it could be good if it has been done legally from Nintendo instead of being a leak.
It seems unlikely to me, but I think that's the only real potential for damage.
With many games being outright f2p or very cheap (except AAA titles) I don't get why they all are so uptight about DRM/piracy...
Face allows Nintendo to take their holier-than-thou attitude. It is why they feel that they are allowed to both destroy the community's own work [2][3][4] and steal it for themselves [5][6]. We profess love for Mario, Zelda, Pikachu, and Metroid, and in return, they are socially empowered to abuse us.
Imagine a world where copyright were only 14 years, as in the original, or 2 years, as in my back-of-napkin estimation of how long it takes to publish something and have it fully saturate the world market. In such a world, Nintendo's back catalog would no longer have the force of law behind its monopoly; they would still publish excellent games, but they would not be able to prevent others from enjoying them. Indeed, there is not any reasonable claim to financial damages, just facial damages.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo#Intellectual_property...
[2] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/4dbf90f837296db72ca959e1...
[3] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2016/2016-12-27-N...
[4] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2017/2017-06-22-N...
[5] https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-01-18-did-nintendo-d...
[6] https://old.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/9as2ii/did_ninte...
You oversold both examples.
2, 3, and 4: That's a hosted(?) emulator distributing, or at least referencing, Nintendo IP, and not in a fair-use context.
You're mildly right about 5 and 6. Nintendo stole the header of ROM files of content that was stolen from Nintendo. The author of the header would have a claim against Nintendo, but seeing how they'd have to explain how the ROM got distributed in the first place, and it's not clear there's enough information in the header for it to be eligible for copyright, I doubt they'd say anything.
Deleted Comment
(It's an Asian concept that might be grossly explained to Westerners as social reputation or honor.)
Deleted Comment
(At least that's what they will most likely give as an argument)
There was a presentation [0] leaked that outlined that usernames "weren't simple enough". It's a great look into Nintendo's Wi-Fi Strategy
[0] https://www.docdroid.net/Qr3JNsl/wi-fi-concept-pdf#page=11
SW-7899-1252-5983 is simpler than username systems children could figure out on Neopets and Club Penguin? People can guess your username because they know your name is Billy?
Discord and Blizzard have the ultimate ez solution: What username do you want? Billy. Alright, if you want someone to find you, give them this string: Billy#1201.
Nintendo still hasn't made an online system as good as Xbox Live in 2002. How they justify SW-7899-1252-5983 as the ideal trade-off sheds some light that they might have an institional-level lack of intuition about what a compelling online experience looks like. Which is interesting because I think most people by now assumed catastrophic indifference.
The only danger in downloading something leaked on 4chan is that you run the risk of learning a little more about dolphins than you might have liked.
I'm a huge N64 enthusiast and wanted to see the Verilog source.