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Emuparadise, one of the most popular emulator sites in the world, has made the decision to remove all ROM files from availability after almost two decades of serving the Legally Grey community.
A statement on the site, titled ‘Emuparadise is changing’, explained the decision thusly: “Many of you are aware that the situation with regards to emulation sites has been changing recently. What you probably don’t know is that we at EmuParadise have been dealing with similar issues for all 18 years of our existence.
“From receiving threatening letters in the early days to our hosts suddenly shutting down our servers due to complaints, we’ve seen it all. We’ve always complied with takedown requests but as you can see, that is no guarantee of anything… Unfortunately, it’s not possible right now to do so in a way that makes everyone happy and keeps us out of trouble.”
As such, the site is removing all ROMs – no downloads are available on the site any more. It’s a victory for the license holders, but there are questions around the scorched earth policy to the approach, as so very many older games are available in no way other than through the – inadvertent – archiving practices of emulation sites like Emuparadise.
The decision comes in the wake of Nintendo filing lawsuits against a number of emulation sites. Last month LoveRETRO and LoveROMS removed all Nintendo titles hosted on their sites after receiving a lengthy legal challenge from the Japanese company.
It would appear this has had a chilling effect on others in the emulation community, and it will be a blow to those who take advantage of the services previously offered by Emuparadise – questionable legality aside.
The site will continue as a database of emulators and ROM listings, but all active downloads have been switched off and are no longer available.
