Your Most Nostalgic Nintendo 3DS Games Are Now Dead

09.03.2024 - 14:47 / screenrant.com / Nintendo

Roughly one year after Nintendo closed the e-store for the 3DS the company has now caused the leading 3DS emulator, Citra, to cease development, creating a vacuum for the console’s game preservation and access. The end of Citra is collateral damage resulting from the latest of Nintendo’s aggressive litigation decisions. This is an inarguably tragic result for game preservation. Fans with the resources to purchase increasingly expensive 3DS hardware and game titles on the secondary market do nothing to financially benefit either Nintendo or the original publishers. Nintendo has harmed access to games it has no financial stake in.

The Nintendo 3DS e-store closed on March 27, 2023, at the same time as the e-store for the Wii U, cutting off any avenue to profitable software sales for those consoles.

Emulation is critical for game preservation. Even the official sources for prior generation games primarily make use of emulation rather than duplicating the original hardware, as seen with everything from the officially licensed games on the Evercade console series to Nintendo’s own Switch Online service. Fans of older generation games can use the Steam Deck for emulation, a PC, or even dedicated emulation portables. Citra was not flawless, and it still had a way to go before achieving the goal of full compatibility with the entire 3DS library, but thanks to Nintendo, 3DS game preservation has been set back immensely.

The death of Citra resulted from Nintendo’s lawsuit against Tropic Haze, the developers of both the Switch emulator Yuzu and the 3DS emulator Citra. As is typical with lawsuits from a large company with massive financial resources against a smaller group, Tropic Haze lacked the resources to afford to battle the issues out in court and opted for a settlement wherein Nintendo is owed $2.4 million, and the developer crew has also ceased development and distribution of both of its emulator projects. Past legal precedents consistently show that emulation software is legally safe and protected, however.

There have been successful lawsuits against websites that provide video game ROM files for profit. The most infamous of such suits was also made by Nintendo. Emulation software itself, however, has been consistently ruled as legally permissible.

During the original PlayStation era, Sony sued the makers of the Virtual Game Station for Macintosh computers and Bleem for PC. These events established a pattern where the courts confirmed the legitimacy of emulation software, even for a console that was currently in production, the PS1, but a gargantuan company like Sony could instead outspend the makers of these products. Sony failed in its lawsuit against Connectix, as well its appeal to the Supreme Court,