WTF happened to Yuzu, and what comes next?
Wow! What a boring couple weeks in the the hobby of emulation, huh? Just dull as all heck. Nothing happening. Definitely not the most consequential two weeks of the last 20 years for playing console videogames on computers; heck, it's probably perfectly fine for me to go to a press junket for Dune: Awakening in Los Angeles on a Tuesday. What could happen while I'm there for the day? It's not like Nintendo would sue an emulator developer or something. 😂
Folks, lemme tell ya — my February 27th was pretty dang stressful, though I imagine not as stressful as waking up to the legal equivalent of an M16 in your face! About an hour before I sat down to watch a three hour movie about big worms, Stephen Totilo broke the news (as far as I know) that Nintendo was suing Switch emulator Yuzu, blaming the developers for, among other things, facilitating the piracy of 1+ million copies of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. If you'd like to picture this moment, see the above, but give Cary Grant a beat-up iPhone 8 in one hand for Slack, a Galaxy Flip in the other to frantically DM people on Discord and look up the Bleem! and Connectix legal precedents. (Also subtract like 50 handsome points cause I'm not giving myself that kind of credit). Props to my PC Gamer brother of a thousand battles Andy Chalk for doing the heavy lifting on the news coverage that day with a little help from me as I stress-inhaled cookies.
So that happened. And then Yuzu got a lawyer, setting us up for what could be the first emulation lawsuit since the early 2000s, a case that could dramatically lighten or darken the "grey area" everyone loves to refer to emulation's home as. Scary, but also in some ways exciting. I was ready for this story to play out over a course of months or years, because nothing makes it through the legal system quickly, right?
