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The NES games inside Animal Crossing blew my mind as a kid. It's amusing to consider I was sitting there playing NES games inside a GameCube game rather than playing the GameCube game itself.

Maybe it's licensing or something, but the fact that Nintendo doesn't simply have its entire catalogue available via virtual console is a real shame. The passionate console hacking/reverse engineering community has managed to make near-perfect emulators for everything up to the Wii, and pretty good support for the Switch. Accessing this takes only a few minutes to accomplish on the high seas, but somehow Nintendo takes years to add a few games to their own service.

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Nintendo is more likely than most publishers to delay releases to avoid competing with themselves. Their new virtual console strategy is a slow drip feed that won't distract from their main titles or impact sales at all, so a subscription fee.

If they every have a badly selling console like the Wii u again expect them to ramp up emulators to look generous and add a lot of value quickly.

Is the market for Nintendo games really so small that decades-old titles will meaningfully compete with their current ones? Surely the demand for SMB must be minuscule compared to the demand for their modern games among consumers?

Is Breath of the Wild really going to lose sales to Legend of Zelda? Are there really consumers who will only buy one or the other?

Not to NES games, but it might distract from news about it (minor effect on sales) and their emulation catalogue is now up to GameCube games. So the question is whether a five or ten dollar copy of wind Waker could distract from an 80 dollar tears of the kingdom.

They also have more marginal games - captain toad or whatever - sold at the same price as their big titles. Those seem pretty vulnerable imo.

IMO the newest Mario Kart (Switch 2) is the first one that’s probably better than Double Dash. That’s three consoles in a row where I think the GameCube game’s better than the newer offerings (and that’s not even a nostalgia game for me—that’d be the original, and the N64 one, neither of which is very good).

I'll second this. DoubleDash was _so good_ that it really hasn't been beat since (I haven't played MK World, the latest, so can't assess that yet)

The ordinary game is pretty damn good, but all the tracks exist in one "world" and your character + kart are racing around it on autopilot in the background of the main menu. You can press a button to dismiss the menu and take over the kart, and start a free-roam mode of the entire game-world with all kinds of challenges and such to select from.

I'm not quite sure it displaces Double Dash as far as straight-up obsoleting it, but it's the first I've seen that brings enough good new stuff to the table that I'd at least sometimes choose it over DD, all else being equal. Every other one I was like "this is OK but I'd sorta rather just be playing Double Dash".

Melee is widely regarded int he community as much better than the successors, too, and it's pretty much the only game that survived its sequel in the whole series

Yeah I've played more Mario Kart than Smash Bros. and am only a very-casual player of either (... but this surely describes the overwhelming majority of people buying and playing these games?) so I wouldn't claim with some kind of authority that Melee's the best Smash Bros., but all the ones since have felt way too fiddly for me and I didn't enjoy them at all, despite really liking the first two entries in the series (and especially Melee).

Another case where my "nostalgia" one is the N64 game, not Melee, so I don't think it's a nostalgia thing making me prefer the Gamecube version.

For a comparison, try to find a good legal version of Namco Pac-Man on mobile that isn't locked under a Namco Museum Vol. 1 IAP. The Namco Museum app itself is "free" and you get 1942, but have to buy the others.

The virtual console is now offering GameCube titles. GameCube/PS2/XBox was the tipping point when most major 3D releases looked reasonably good and the hardware was strong enough that developers were encountering fewer limitations that hampered the games in very fundamental ways. Compare Resident Evil 1 on the Playstation to the remake one generation later on the GameCube to see a very direct example of this.

Additionally video games can be a major time investment. Disney doesn't worry about the older Star Wars movies cannibalizing interest in the new ones because you can match the original trilogy in a single evening, were beating a single game could potentially take months. The quality of the entire Zelda series on average is extremely high and the majority of the games are still worth playing, a young gamer could easily start going through the library and find themselves having enough fun to just keep focusing on that instead of purchase the latest and greatest at top dollar.

This is why we ban advertising to children and copyright should expire after 30 years, there's nothing but rent-seeking going on and taking advantage of nostalgia. This isn't encouraging creative works which is why we as a country give the monopoly to artists in the first place. People should have the right to remix the culture they grew up with.

Some people believe copyright should be perpetual. Those people are wrong, but we must still fight against that idea.

I blame the widespread adoption of digital communications. What's the saying? A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth can pull its pants up?

We should have kept the internet for nerds only. The day we introduced e-commerce to the internet, we killed it.

Eternal September indeed.

FWIW licensing is definitely part of why some 'obvious' stuff is still missing, Nintendo doesn't own the rights to games that they didn't develop themselves (generally speaking).

Ex. We'll probably never see the first six FF games on Switch Online, Square Enix is just unlikely to agree to that for a variety of reasons.

Which is rather surprising to me. I don't know what the contracts between Nintendo and developers say but I would have expected "rights to publish or distribute in perpetuity" would have been in there as part of the deal for making official carts.

Nintendo already tried this kind of power grab, more or less, and it failed.

The NES didn't have software lockout in Japan. Most third-party Famicom[0] games were manufactured and sold by their publishers, with little or no control from Nintendo. Nintendo's way to wrestle back control over their platform was the Famicom Disk System, a disk drive add-on that was intended to work around the NES's 32k ROM limit (and associated costs of ROM) with cheaper disks that could hold up to 64k of loadable data per side.

The key was that the FDS had two lockout features that Famicom cartridges didn't:

- FDS disks had an imprint of the Nintendo logo at the bottom that meshed with plates in the disk drive. If your disk did not say Nintendo on it, it would not mount in the drive and the game would not play.

- FDS disks were rewritable, and Nintendo planned to sell games at special vending machines that would write you a fresh disk. If you weren't selling your game through Nintendo, your game wouldn't be on these vending machines.

So if you wanted your game on FDS, you needed to sign a distribution agreement with Nintendo. I'm told the terms were rather draconian. Most developers just... put larger ROMs and better enhancement chips on their third-party Famicom cartridges. This continued until someone figured out how to copy FDS games using just the RAM adapter carts and Nintendo gave up on the FDS concept entirely.

To be clear, Nintendo did have software lockout in the US, and you did have to license your game to Nintendo and have them sell copies of it using their hardware. This caused a lot of problems for NES releases of Famicom games that had custom chips in them (e.g. Contra). But even then, these were not perpetual licenses.

A perpetuality requirement would have killed any and all licensed games stone dead. If you're making a movie tie-in cash grab game on NES, you don't want to have to license that movie in perpetuity just because Nintendo demands a perpetual sublicense for a game with an expected shelf-life of about a year. Hell, not even Nintendo licensed Mike Tyson for Punch-Out perpetually.

[0] "Famicom" is just "Nintendo" in Japanese!

> I would have expected "rights to publish or distribute in perpetuity"

I think that would have been unlikely to occur to Nintendo's lawyers, since in the NES era, publishers required the developer's co-operation to provide masters targeting any additional platforms. This was before intergenerational emulation and internet distribution became widespread, and Nintendo would have had a sunset date for NES title sales.

That's probably true for later generations, but in the NES (and maybe SNES) era? Undoubtedly, they didn't have the foresight to write that into the contracts.

In the early days of television, many broadcasters were prohibited by contract to retain any copies of the performance, because no value was seen in reusing them, and there's no other reason to give them any rights. Also see shows like WKRP in Cincinnati where music was only licensed for the slim purpose of the original broadcast (and perhaps direct repeats in syndication), but for release on home video, the music used did not support that use, so it had to be replaced.

I imagine we won't see MGS: Twin Snakes for the same reason

Nintendo is the Apple of gaming. They want top-down control. This is evident over the years from how they've treated everyone from Tengen (who admittedly did cross the line in gaining access to 10NES), to UltraHLE, to yuzu. They want control, and they have a huge war chest to spend on that.

I'm waiting for someone to make some tools/hardware for copying Nintendo games that also keep themselves completely clean legally. AFAIK, both the yuzu and the MIG Switch people were kinda shady and didn't stay fully legally above board. Many of the publicized court cases where Nintendo went after mod purveyors, it turned out they were also dealing in pirated software. Where is our savior, who rejects any pirated software or illegal ROMs but still makes the emulator or "modchip" work

The emulator community may be why it is not potentially profitable for Nintendo, since most of the nostalgia market has already been served for free

> The NES games inside Animal Crossing blew my mind as a kid.

The nesticle emulator blew my mind as a kid.

thanks shitman

The biggest barrier is needing to modify the games to reduce the chance of triggering epileptic seizures. Nintendo has been good about archiving and knowledge preservation, but modifications may still be difficult or uneconomical.

And then if you had the right cable you could connect a Game Boy Advance, and it would download the game to it, allowing you to play it on the go (well until you turned it off at least, since the game was stores in RAM)

Yup, they're sitting on millions of hours of work because of some nefarious business logic. Probably they determined that making old games available would negatively impact the sales of their new products, at least enough to be a problem. Whatever the reason, a shame.

Id software open sourced the Doom engine, so anyone could play custom levels or enjoy community assets without directly benefiting Id. That's why Doom, and by extension Id software, disappeared so swiftly into obscurity.

But Doom hasn't disappeared into obscurity at all.

it was sarcasm through counter example.

the parent comment mentioned:

> Yup, they're sitting on millions of hours of work because of some nefarious business logic. Probably they determined that making old games available would negatively impact the sales of their new products, at least enough to be a problem. Whatever the reason, a shame.

so he replied with "yeah, id software did that and people forgot about doom" exactly because that gave new life to the old game and the franchise probably has better health today due to the community involvement. (not a great analogy, but has a point)

You hope it was "sarcasm through counter example".

This discussion from about 9 months ago explains it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42259040

> The NES games inside Animal Crossing blew my mind as a kid

Sounds similar to Donkey Kong 64 (1999) that had an arcade machine inside a level that let you play the original Donkey Kong (1981): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwPRHdhhVK8

> Nintendo doesn't simply have its entire catalogue available via virtual console

Not entirely the same, but Nintendo does offer a lot of their classic games through the Nintendo Switch Online membership: https://www.nintendo.com/us/online/nintendo-switch-online/cl...

What I think they're pointing out is that the Wii, Wii u, and 3ds did have the virtual console and basically the full back catalogue available on it. It took the lifetime of the switch for the new service to get a comparable line up.

> Sounds similar to Donkey Kong 64 (1999) that had an arcade machine inside a level that let you play the original Donkey Kong (1981)

Interesting tidbit about that is that it was carefully recreated from scratch by Rare, rather than being emulated, because Nintendo doesn't have/own the rights to the original source code. They originally had Ikegami Tsushinki do the programming for the arcade version, who later claimed ownership of the source code and eventually won the lawsuit.

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-secret-history-of...

Nintendo and Ikegami settled out of court. I'm assuming Nintendo got the rights to the arcade version as part of the settlement, as the arcade version of Donkey Kong got a release on Switch as part of Arcade Archives. https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/arcade-archives-d...

The distinction is, if I stop paying for the Switch Online membership at any point (or forget to renew), all those titles go away. By contrast, my Animal Crossing Gamecube disk still works. :)

People have even come up with generic gift codes that can unlock some of the NES games Nintendo never "officially" released for AC, like Legend of Zelda, Punch-Out, and a few others.

My entire basement house in the original Animal Crossing is filled with nothing but gyroids and NES games.

Fun fact: Nintendo originally had the idea to make other games available in such a way that you could download them to a GC memory card (or indeed the N64 original) and play them from there.

https://youtu.be/2w0U_evVEd4

https://youtu.be/A5YdD1pYzes + https://youtu.be/0cpjhIS6ClI

> near-perfect emulators

And there's the reason Nintendo isn't doing it. The top priority for them by a massive margin is consistency. The QA they perform for their own products would require an absolutely enormous amount of staff, all for a minuscule payout because there just is not the kind of demand for those games that would justify such a return.

Nintendo's own Switch release of Super Mario Sunshine used an outdated version of Dolphin, one of those imperfect emulators. (People were remarking on the emulator bugs as soon as it was released.) They saw a demand and didn't let QA get in their way.

That's not true, the Switch version of Sunshine runs on an in-house Gamecube/Wii emulator called Hagi. Nintendo have always rolled their own emulators, although curiously their NES emulator uses a ROM header format which originated in the unofficial emulation scene, so they must have used unofficial docs for reference.

Even if Nintendo wanted to use existing emulators, they wouldn't touch a GPL project like Dolphin anyway. They do use open source libraries in their games but never, ever GPL ones for fairly obvious reasons.

> although curiously their NES emulator uses a ROM header format which originated in the unofficial emulation scene, so they must have used unofficial docs for reference.

Tomohiro Kawase, the guy who did the Animal Crossing NES emulator, was a part of the emulation community in the 90s and contributed to iNES. It makes sense that he kept using that header format when he started working at Nintendo.

I wouldn't even say that use of a header format itself is indicative of wrongdoing, even if Tomohiro hadn't went on to work for Nintendo.

However, if Nintendo had released any NES ROMs with a "DiskDude!" header? Then maybe. AFAIK this never happened though, and the big leak proved that they had a full final (and sometimes post-final or unreleased final) archive with split PRG/CHR, so they didn't need to use DiskDude! ROMs.

Yeah I think it was just the developer working with what he was familiar with. For example, the emulator used for the 3DS NES Virtual Console titles was developed by a different team at iQue. It uses its own bespoke header format called TNES rather than the standard iNES header.

Ah, sorry. I remembered people at the time of its release saying it was Dolphin because some of the bugs were identical. I guess I misremembered that speculation as fact. I didn't even know Dolphin was GPL. Thanks for correcting me.

There might also have been some confusion because the Gamecubes official codename was Dolphin, so Nintendo's emulator may well have the string "Dolphin" in it despite having nothing to do with that Dolphin.

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