The site of Ryujinx's demise.
Nintendo’s been on a litigious roll this year—and by roll, I mean in the Katamari Damacy way, where eventually the thing’s soaking up entire aeroplanes and grown large enough to blot out the sun as it hurtles towards your apartment in a screaming amalgam of metal and concrete. Where was I? Oh, right.
Going after Palworld, taking around 20 years of Garry’s Mod items from the Steam Workshop, elbow-dropping Citra and Yuzu, grabbing a chair from the announcer’s table and slamming it over the head of a Palworld-to-Pokémon mod, and seemingly being so scary that Valve preemptively snubbed a N64 Portal remake just in case the Disney of videogames tried anything expensive and legislatively exhausting: Everything I’ve just listed was in 2024, by the way, the list goes on.
Anyway, Switch emulator Ryujinx was the latest emulator told to muscle out or sleep with the fishes, a legal demand its creators very quickly complied with. As if to add insult to injury, though, it looks like Nintendo’s now set up shop in Ryujinx’s domain name (thanks, Gamesradar).
As spotted on the emulator’s subreddit, whois.com identifies Nintendo of America Inc. as the registrant contact for ryujinx.org. While the site updated on November 7, it’s entirely possible the company swooped in and snapped it up sooner.
It’s extremely likely that (despite sometimes grabbing emulators to run stuff in the official Nintendo museum) the company is merely doing this to further silence any potential shenanigans by Ryujinx’s remaining advocates, scattered to the four winds of Github as they probably are. The cost of a random domain like the emulator’s former website is likely a whisper of a drop in the ocean of Nintendo’s annual budget, so snapping it up is a no-brainer.
It is sort of appropriately morbid, though—like using the bones of your freshly-slain enemy to build a house no-one can enter. It’s the latest move to mark the seemingly fast-approaching dark age of game preservation, if it’s not already here. Last year, it was observed that around 87% of games were unplayable without using piracy, getting lucky, or physically going to an archive. As the study at the time put it:
“Imagine if the only way to watch Titanic was to find a used VHS tape, and maintain your own vintage equipment so that you could still watch it. And what if no library, not even the Library of Congress, could do any better—they could keep and digitise that VHS of Titanic, but you’d have to go all the way there to watch it.”
Alas, considering the present wild west of what a company is and isn’t required to do in order to support their game, it’s likely we’ll be seeing these efforts rise and fall in a perpetual game of whack-a-mole, with Nintendo parading around the still-financially-indebted Gary Bowser as a warning to all not to push their luck.
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