AUTHENTIC console EXPERIENCE

   I don't remember exactly how old I was when my brother was showing off one of the first things he'd ever downloaded on our old dial-up connection. I was about eight, maybe ten - I dunno, but I remember the little severed hand mouse pointer fondly.

  The program was NESticle, and I remember it because it was my first foray into emulation. I had no idea how it worked and my oldest brother was loath to explain it to me. Maybe he considered being able to work out how a computer program functioned to be my rite of passage.

(One of the first NES emulators)

   I grew up with an NES, but videogames hadn't been something that was readily available when I was a kid. Even when my brothers had convinced my parents to buy a Playstation, most of the stuff we afforded was all second hand or purchased when the local video-store stopped renting older games. There was the occasional trip to Software Etc, but by the time that was happening the Playstation was an old fad to my brothers.

   We never had a whole lot of cash when I was a kid, so in many ways being able to trade games and especially being able to trade PC games contributed a lot to me playing videogames as a kid. I grew out of Zelda and into games like Anachronox, which is still one of my favorite games.

   I was absolutely starstruck, sitting there watching my brother play Castlevania on our incredibly old PC. I was enamored with Quake III Arena when he brought it home - but there was just something utterly amazing at finally having acces to all of the games I had only ever gotten to read about.

(Anachronox)

   Sometimes I get asked the question what games I "grew" up with. I mostly tell people Zelda, but what I generally leave out is that I grew up only playing Zelda. It was one of the few games my parents had for the Nintendo they had bought. Sometimes I would even watch my dad - who is a through and through cowboy, sit and navigate the caverns and forests of Hyrule.

   By the time our first computer rolled around, we didn't have a working NES anymore. My brothers had moved onto the Playstation. As far as older consoles go we'd had a Sega Genesis but there wasn't anything about it that interested me. Telling, I also had never owned a single Sonic The Hedgehog game for our Sega.

   When my brother had finally drug me to the computer the day he showed me NESticle I probably sat for a good six or seven hours after he relinquished control of it. I spent time with Zelda and Mario, Megaman and all of the games I'd only ever gotten a chance to read about.

It was a weird validating experience of my childhood, that at that time was starting to give way to being worried about acting old enough. By the time I learned enough about computers to surf on the waves of the net and metaphorically "hang ten" with data, I mostly wasted afternoons trying to download Metal Slug X off of Edge Emulation.


   Yes: emulation was kind of a big deal. I was "that" little kid that was super into videogames. I bought Tips & Tricks monthly, Playstation magazine. It gave me a chance to have a dialogue with my older brothers, and I felt included. One day I went from sitting on the floor watching my oldest brother beat Castlevania to trying to do it myself while he watched. He did quite a lot of laughing, too.

  Eventually I got more interested in emulation than any of my brothers were. If I could experience the NES, what was next? I never had an Super Nintendo as a kid, instead I had to make do with occasionally renting it, or playing Secret of Mana with my cousin. Either way, it mean a whole lot of sitting on the floor in peoples living rooms.

(Secret of Mana)

   It would also be my oldest brother who would help my personal foray into the world of emulation. Help me sign up for my first forum, too - though I doubt he remembers it (The forum was Edge Emulation!). It was weird, thinking about it now, how much my life on the internet as a kid and a younger teenager kind of mirrored his. He'd signed up for internet comedy megastars Something Awful, I settled for Arch-Nacho and Tortilla Godzilla's Quality Roms (second forum, after Edge shut down)

   It was through that website, that I started to see that emulation was more than just a way to play old games. Emulation, the argument became, was a legitimate way to archive and support the proliferation of older titles. It's an easy argument to make, too.

   As an example, Megaman Legends 2 is basically considered one of the mega classic videogames, but if you want to play it now it's going to cost you upward of two-hundred dollars. Closer to a hundred if you're just gonna buy the disc by itself. Videogames are a collector controlled second hand market. What that means is that prices for second hand games aren't controlled by actual demand, but artificially made desirable by collectors offering titles at ridiculous prices.

   Megaman Legends 2 is ascribed that value because it's particularly rare - losing it for cheap would be considered a bad investment. I doubt most of the people that think it's a particularly mega cool game have even ever played it - but it had a limited print run and it wont ever get released. So if you want to play it, you're going to pay for it.

   Unless there were some magical workaround that meant someone could just allegedly acquire it and play it for free. Oh wait that's emulation, no big deal. I played Megaman Legends 2 through an emulator, and countless other games. The ESA - who does very little to archive or allow copies of videogames to proliferate, considers me a criminal.

(Megaman Legends 2)

   If you're not familiar, ESA stands for Entertainment Software Association. They've existed for quite awhile, but it was only during the 2000's that they really started to have an effect on emulation: Telling hazily legal websites which titles they could offer and which they couldn't. This is weird, to me, as a person who doesn't work in the industry, that it would happen.

   Videogames are not "film". For various reasons, videogames in the past were hardly ever re-released. If you wanted to play Super Metroid legally before the Virtual Console existed, you needed to buy an SNES and find someone selling a copy of the game, hopefully for an affordable price.

   Even though we now do have resources that allow players to legally experience some games, and not just experience them but do so in a way that supports the original developer, there are still titles that will never be offered through these avenues.

   Developer incompetence, or licensing issues? (If involving Capcom, the former).
Either way, emulation continues to be a bit of a hot button issue. It's getting harder and harder every day to find roms that are quality like you used to. To say nothing of losing SnesOrama's incredibly valuable trade forum - which had titles that are literally impossible to find physical copies of.

   When was the last time you heard somebody get excited about fuckin' The Granstream Saga?
It doesn't really matter, but there's an argument to be made that just like film, every videogame is important to discussion and understanding of the medium. Less so to groups like the ESA, who consider the very cataloging and archiving of these titles a heinous affront to nature and culture (probably).

(Twinkle Star Sprites)

  I could seriously go to jail for wanting to play the NEO-GEO version of Twinkle Star Sprites. That's a very real thing that could happen. That doesn't seem weird to anyone else? I understand the argument against film piracy, because a lot of the time the original creators are still profiting from re-releases. That's not something that's true about videogames, though. I doubt Takashi Takebe saw a dollar of the Playstation Network re-release of Grandia II.

   Irrespective of it's legality, emulation has affected an entire age group of people who play videogames. Fitted somewhere in the "generation y" aspect of our society are the people like me who might've grown up playing an SNES or Sega CD on their computer, rather than the authentic console experience. Some of these people might even be the age where they could buy a gamepad meant to work with their controller, at least recreating part of that classic experience. Some of them might even have played them sitting on their carpet.

   I doubt I'd have the interest I do in videogames - artistically or even in terms of the enjoyment I get out of them without emulation. It was EPSXE, which I spent days and days trying to get to work, that I was finally able to play Vagrant Story through. This was before it was offered on Playstation Network for 4.99.

(Vagrant Story)

   I could have bought Vagrant Story no doubt! Just who's hands would I have been putting my hard earned dollar in though? In the hands of another player, no doubt, but how much I wanted to experience Vagrant Story far outshined how willing I was to pay some collector more money than I felt comfortable with.

  Today, Vagrant Story is still on my list of favorite videogames. It's a mess of half-imagined game mechanics that don't always work the way they need to. Vagrant Story's real charm is right there in the title: There's not a better example of a well crafted narrative on the original Playstation.
I played it through emulation and it influenced the kind of games I'd like to go on to make, it also influenced the stories I write about and what kind of quality I want to see more games aspire to.

(Vagrant Story)

   My interface with EPSXE was an old digital keyboard on my parents computer that didn't quite work all of the way. Mapping out the original Playstation's controls to it was a nightmare, and finding a way that the game ran comfortably even more so. I was also running a plugin pack that made the game seem a little sharper and eliminated the original Playstation's fuzziness.

   There was no "authentic console experience" with Vagrant Story. I played a game independent of slowdown issues, stuttering sound being played back through crusty hardware or jagged edges from a stressed graphics chip. I played a version independent of the real one, and to be honest, I would take it 100% of the time.

  Now, at 22, I've had plenty of time to go back and play some of these games in their original forms. What I've discovered is that there's really no "more valid" way to experience older videogames. You can tell someone that the best way to experience Casablanca is in an old dusty theatre somewhere, but you can't discount their opinion and relationship to the film because they didn't see it that way.

   Even in spite of events like the shutdown of SnesOrama's popular trade board, people continue to collect, share and archive older videogames. Maybe some of them do it just so they can play them, maybe some of them have a full hard-drive waiting for the day the old discs and cartridges stop working so they can say "Hah! I told you!" either way, I owe a love of videogames as a medium to a lot of those people, and to my brother for helping me take those first steps.

-SKELETONS