One Of The Web's Oldest ROM Sites Removes Games By Nintendo, Sega And Lego

Then make the fecking games available for us to buy !
Make it easy to buy and play and OWN and we will come.

Why don't companies understand this simple concept ?

And Vimm has always been my go to site ever since i first encountered it years and years ago.

Thankfully there is still always the archive.
Whats that song again ? Something about never gonna keep us down.

( tubthumbing)

That really sucks, Vimm's Lair is (well, now "was") a pretty brilliant site. I was hoping they wouldn't get touched, but alas.

Just swung by the website to see the damage. Looks like a lot of stuff is still up there, even some Nintendo published stuff still remains, but your big names like Mario, Sonic, Mega Man, etc are likely all gone now from the brief checking I did. Even, for example, Kirby's Adventure was still up. However who's to say that more games like this won't be taken down very shortly as well.

EDIT: My mistake. While the download link is still available for many games such as Kirby's Adventure, this link does not work. Well, RIP Vimm's Lair, then.

@KitsuneNight

yeah, just sell the Roms on Gog or else and let it use it wherever we want, be it on an Everdrive, Emulation or FPGA Device.

"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem"

@Azuris
Not even that.
et them release official collections like Capcom Arcade Stadium, or the Megadrive Ultimate collection.
Let them strike up a deal with Blaze for Everdrive carts

Just give us SOMETHING to buy and play.

I always knew this day would come. And people called me a hoarder for meticulously backing up every ROM and MP3 that I downloaded!

@N64-ROX Yeah, it was definitely a matter of when this would happen. I knew this would happen too. It did take longer than I expected, but backing stuff up like that was the smart thing to do. And storage has been relatively affordable, all things considered.

I'd be curious which games specifically got takedown requests. I don't know if there's ever been a list of: "These are the games in particular that the ESA is interested in enforcing copyright for."

@KitsuneNight their idea is narrow the marketplace to their own channels. They care infinitely more about google search results than preserving old creations. That’s why preservation can never be left to business. They would let all that creative history fade away even if it only magnifies their SEO. It’s crazy, but to their business, their handful of old games for official subscription, is all the public needs to know about old games. And again, that’s crazy. And that’s business.

Opening up of iOS is doing more unintended harm (to people not even using iOS) than good at this point.

Can these companies go after archive.org? There is nowhere better.

@ch37x From what I've seen, at most archive.org can block public access to the files, but identifying (through legal registration) as a preservation organization gives them the right to host the files.

People like you for making this article and those stupid iPhone kiddies on Twitter are the absolute reason for it. Plastering all over Twitter because iPhones finally have emulators. Well y'all iPhone users done screwed yourselves and now everyone else

@KitsuneNight

The Mega Drive Collection actually contains the Roms
You can also extract the Roms from the Contra and Castlevania Collections.

Haven't checked the Rest, but you are right, give it out to buy.

I mean also the physical Rereleases, i can dump the Roms myself with those.

Thank goodness I nabbed these awhile back 😅

Protect the archive at all costs!

You guys need to read between the lines. You know what that means?

RETRO-GAMES-STOREFRONT on SWITCH 2 confirmed!

lol

@N64-ROX Big same. I spent the early 2000's ripping my considerable cd collection to 320k mp3s, before swapping over to buying music digitally. NOT streaming, buying, directly from the artist when I can. I have the main copy of my library on a local hdd, a backup on my plex server, and an archival backup in a drawer, just in case. This does remind me that I need to backup my roms, cause that's currently taking up half of an 8Tb hdd that may well be dying.

Once again, the normies ruin everything.

Huh. As i clicked on the article, i thought "As long as it's not Vimm's Lair, i don't really care." That's a shame.

I just discovered Vimm’s Lair about a month ago after getting into emulation/retro gaming. It’s been nothing but amazing reliving the games from my youth through Miyoo+ & Analog Pocket! This is sad news but I am not surprised at all. Lots of traffic to the site, hashtags and Delta taking the number one spot in the App Store. Damn kids ruined everything lol

Cut one head hundred new will grow .

@Bonggon5 clearly enough people that they finally got caught up with Nintendo

@TheDiggler
Normie Cu...err Normies flooding a niche hobby is never a good thing.
It drives prices up and floods the niche with clueless idiots.

@Scollurio
You hope
Since when do IP holders need any other excuse other then "MEIN!!!" ?
It would be at least something if true, and I would begrudgingly rebuy the damn things again.

@Bonggon5
Clearly enough people to give a damn.
There is somebody who discovered Vimm recently just above your comment.

@ch37x

Back to torrents we go. No harm. That’ll gate iOS emulation users and so may avoid Nintendos wrath due to its intensively whack-a-mole nature.

This right here is why I gatekeep where I get my roms from.

It's a secret to everybody.

Glad I grabbed backups of all my old Wii VC purchases and PSP titles before they went then.

If a company like Sony just bought PPSSPP and created a storefront for old games people would buy them.

plenty of other websites on the internet to grab roms from. they are never going away. might just need to spend a bit more time to find them is all.

Heard of Vimms but never used. Says a lot though. Archives or otherwise and companies go eh well we won't renew the license/resell them so we go and do this instead. Unfortunate but is what it is.

In terms of their priorities it makes sense but if they don't own the IPs anymore then.... But in terms of protecting themselves companies or these types of sites sure I get it.

At least other archive sources elsewhere exist but for how long and how many. It's like any old material of news and other games. They want to bury their past. Well we want to buy them, play them, document them, see the lessons learned, how audiences did or didn't respond to them, whether they can have a try again years later.

All that money, copies disappear. For niche games it's the worst but mainstream hits eh I mean you can get them anywhere let alone ROM hacks.

@KitsuneNight My comment obviously was tongue-in-cheek. There's plenty of business decisions made by any other company out there that I can't comprehend. So let's wait and see.

I do think though, that if Switch 2 goes HARD on retro gaming not only with remasters but also with "officially sanctioned" emulators, i.e. a Virtual Console with plenty of filters, language patches and rom hacks too I think they'd be able to monetize big on it!

I got my Analogue Pocket late last year. Glad I spent a day getting all the games from Vimm's Lair then.