History of The Nintendo Entertainment System - Discontinuation and Emulation (1995-present)

Discontinuation and Emulation (1995-present)

The NES was in popular decline from 1991–1995, with the Sega Genesis and Nintendo's own Super Nintendo Entertainment System chipping away at its market share, and next-generation CD-ROM-based systems on the horizon. Even though the NES was discontinued in North America in 1995, the system had left a mark of many millions of game cartridges. The secondhand market – video rental stores, Goodwill, yard sales, flea markets, games repackaged by Game Time Inc. / Game Trader Inc. and sold at retail stores such as K-Mart – was burgeoning. Parallel to, or perhaps because of this, many people began to rediscover the NES around this time, and by 1997, many older NES games were becoming popular with collectors.

At the same time, computer programmers who were also NES enthusiasts began to develop emulators capable of reproducing the internal workings of the NES on modern personal computers. When paired with a ROM image (a bit-for-bit copy of a NES cartridge's program code), the games could be played on a computer. The illegal trade of ROM images was carried out on various bulletin board systems around the country and, as it became more popular and accessible, on the Internet. Despite this, ROM images were frequently hard to come by, and early emulators in particular were often plagued by computer bugs and compatibility issues – sometimes they were designed to play one specific game.

Despite these inconveniences, emulation provided access to many rare and hard to find games that otherwise might have been forgotten, and provided gamers with a wider selection of titles than ever would have been possible with the original console. Emulators also came with a variety of built-in functions that changed the gaming experience, such as save states which allow the player to save his or her progress at an exact spot in the game and resume later at that exact spot.

On April 2, 1997, Bloodlust Software released NESticle version 0.2 – an emulator that was remarkably stable, compatible, and easy to use by the standards of its day (the product, according to its creator Sardu, of "two weeks of boredom"). NESticle is frequently credited with revolutionizing the console emulation scene, and its success spawned many imitators and competitors. After this, emulators quickly became more refined and ROM images more easily available, attracting more people to emulation, which in turn served as a catalyst for further development, both for NES and other console emulators.

Nintendo did not respond positively to these developments and became one of the most vocal opponents of ROM image trading. Nintendo and its supporters claim that such trading represents blatant software piracy. Proponents of ROM image trading argue that emulation preserves many classic games for future generations, outside of their more-fragile cartridge formats.

The NES "revival" settled down, to a degree, after 2000, once the secondhand market began to dry up or charge collector's prices, and finding ROM images no longer represented the challenge it had in the past. There is also a strong independent community of developers dedicated to producing demos and games for the NES.

In 2005, Nintendo announced plans to make classic NES titles available on the Virtual Console download service for the Wii console. Initial titles released included Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda and Donkey Kong, with blockbuster titles such as Super Mario Bros., Punch-Out!! and Metroid appearing in the months after.

In 2007, Nintendo of Japan announced that it would no longer repair Famicom systems, due to an increasing shortage of the necessary parts.