Like many of you, I had a few extra days last month to relax. I chose to dive into something I’d been tinkering with for several months but never quite had enough time to really enjoy: retro gaming. I don’t play a lot of video games today and when I do, they tend to be the light, casual fare you’ll get on a phone as opposed to the life-altering, hours-long pursuits of modern console games. So, retro gaming seemed quite up my alley.
What is retro gaming?
Retro gaming is, simply, using modern hardware to emulate old game consoles and arcade games. There are a number of excellent pieces of software that will allow you to do this, and many of them have been around for a long time. I’ve dipped my toe into this world a few times over the course of a decade and found it can be pretty easy for even a beginner to explore the world of gaming in the 20th century.
As far as I know, one of the first emulators (if not the first) was MAME. MAME seeks to give you the experience of going to an arcade in the 1980s and 1990s. Chances are your refrigerator has more computing power than an average arcade game at the time, and a lot of those arcade games were built on off-the-shelf hardware. This makes them fairly easy to reverse-engineer.
Lately though, you’ve had the opportunity to buy complete, pre-built systems with tens of thousands of games on them. These range from completely legal and licensed boxes like Atari’s 2600+ to an almost limitless number of extremely sketchy looking handhelds found on weird Chinese shopping sites.
In the middle are products like Batocera. Batocera and software like it are essentially customized versions of Linux that are optimized to let you load old games without having to make a lot of massive and picky choices. You can find guides on Batocera all over the web and if you’re interested in that world, I urge you to check it out. It’s a great way to repurpose an old computer that you haven’t used in a while.
A word about the legality of retro gaming
In order to play these old games, you need two things: a BIOS file which lets your device act like an older game console, and a ROM file, which is essentially an exact copy of the game’s software. There are plenty of places on the internet to find both. In the interest of safety I’ll direct you to the Internet Archive which at the very least seems to scan their files for viruses. Not every site does.
But before you go raiding that site for everything you want, we should at least have the discussion about whether or not it’s legal to go get these files. Legally speaking, the manufacturers of this software, or the companies who bought their intellectual property, hold the rights to it for 100 years after it was first purchased. Yes seriously, 100 years. It doesn’t matter that a lot of these companies went out of business years ago or that it’s practically impossible to find these experiences any other way. Let me be clear here: if you don’t currently own a cartridge, console, or arcade box, then it’s not legal for you to play that game in an emulator.
Now, that said, people do a lot of things that are technically illegal like eat grapes at the grocery store and drive over the legal speed limit. I’m not here to tell you to do that. What I will do is say that there’s often a big gap between ethics and legality. It may be totally ethical to go 85 on an empty road in West Texas when there’s not another soul around. But it’s still illegal. Same here… it may be ethical to find the files for an old game whose manufacturer went out of business thirty years ago. But it’s still illegal. I’ve done my job… you’ve been warned.
For my part, I am compelled to say that my retro gaming experience has been limited to completely licensed games.
Getting back to Aladdin
Back in the 1990s, the world of game consoles was quite a bit different. Microsoft and Sony didn’t have game consoles. If you wanted to play the latest, you got Sega or Nintendo. Most folks agreed that Super Nintendo was the better system. I wasn’t one of them. I enjoyed the Sega Genesis back in those days.
Generally it didn’t matter. Yes, Sega had Sonic the Hedgehog and Nintendo had Mario. But, a lot of games were available on both platforms. It was up to you which one you wanted. There was one weird game though. While it was available on both platforms, the two games were completely different. That game was Disney’s Aladdin.
Aladdin was a pop culture hit in the 1990s. Robin Williams was at the top of his game back then. Alan Menken wrote compelling songs. The Disney animators did some of the best hand-drawn work ever. Naturally a tie-in video game adaptation made sense.
What didn’t make sense is that there were two of them.
For whatever reason…
Disney licensed the rights to the Sega version to Virgin. Yep, that Virgin. The Richard Branson one. On the other hand, the Nintendo rights went to Capcom, makers of Street Fighter. The Virgin developers worked directly with Disney to try to make the game look and feel like the movie. The Capcom folks went their own way.
What emerged were two totally different games. Controversy raged over which was better. Even today it seems the controversy still rages. Take a look at this video from 2019:
It seems that people will never really give up their deeply held opinions here. But then, in 2024, that seems like par for the course.
My opinion? Uninformed, I guess
While the well-heeled of the day had both systems, I had only the Genesis. And I had that cartridge back then and played it beginning to end. So I would place myself in the Sega camp. But then even today I’ve never played the Nintendo version and it’s possible I never will.
Thanks to YouTube, anyone can legally experience the fun of the Sega and Nintendo versions of the game. Here’s a walkthrough of the Sega one:
and here’s the Nintendo one:
Watching these two, I guess I’m still Team Sega. The Sega version has better animation and better music. The gameplay seems more specific to this specific game on Sega, while on Nintendo it feels more generic. Perhaps more than anything, the Sega version seems to capture the spirit of irony that pervaded the early 1990s, back when GenX were young and today’s dad jokes were just referred to as “jokes.”
Should you play them?
As I said, it would be really dumb for a web site like this one to tell you to go out and download pirated software. I’ll say only this… I wish that I could play games like this and hundreds more with a clear conscience. I’ve written for decades about how copyright law needs to be reformed, and how old software should have a copyright period that’s much shorter. It’s important to preserve old technology because it’s the gateway to culture. Unlike a book, a video game could be unplayable in 10 years if the hardware for it disappears. I think this stuff is worth preserving. Even more, I think it’s still fun. At least I’ll tell you it sure looks like it.
