One of those fans, a programmer from Kansas with an offbeat sense of humor and an unmissable skillset, released a PC emulator for the NES – a reverse-engineered software version of the hardware platform. Called “NESticle”, its Windows icon was, quite literally and indelicately, a pair of testicles.
NESticle, nonetheless, did something amazing: It allowed people to play old Nintendo games on cheap computers made by Packard Bell and other firms, and did so while introducing a number of fundamental new ways to appreciate those games. Divorced from Nintendo’s famously draconian licensing strategy, it introduced new ways of thinking about well-tread video games.
Would we have the retro-friendly gaming culture that we do today without its existence? Maybe, but it’s possible it might not be quite so vibrant.
This is the story of how NESticle helped turn retro gaming into a modern cultural force.
I have a retroarch setup on my PC with support for various systems from my childhood, stocked with the games I played as a kid. Other than such personal use, emulators for classic systems serve a vital function in our culture: they make sure old titles will still be playable long after the last hardware to play them on has perished.
Nesticle really was a game changer, but I credit the ‘game ender’ part to UltraHLE. For it was the latter that really attracted the rom beggars and other riffraff like moths to a flame. It was about that time where I went from being heavily involved with the emulation scene to losing interest almost entirely.
Not entirely true. The begging was so bad for smd versions of Genesis roms long before that, that there was even irc channels with dcc bots where you could request roms and they would be sent to you through DCC, just to stop the pestering.
This might have been to stop beggars from flooding the dev channels in some aspect, but they still arrived in droves for support for their illegally procured roms. (especially in DGen and GENS channels, as those were by far the most popular emulators for the system)
Boy, I do remember those games and they here so…..shit.
There has to be a book somewhere in all of this, covering emulation.. something in the spirit of id Software & Masters of Doom…
I remember the first time I saw Nesticle in action. I figured that somehow, these games were ported to PC. I was very young, and had no idea what a hardware emulator was. Not only did Nesticle help me discover countless titles that I never played as a child, but it helped me understand the importance of preservation of old technology. Hats-off, you crazy bastards. Hats-off.
I agree those games were total crap from today’s perspective, but they were the best people had at that time…
Despite that, old people’s nostalgia is probably the only thing keeping them alive in some emulated form. I believe those retro games will be completely forgotten as soon as last person who grew up with them dies.
Well, they will have their place in the museum and history books, but apart from that… That’s about it.
Edited 2017-05-03 06:47 UTC
And i’m a firm believer that most modern titles are crap. In fact, i’ve bought more titles for my PS2 in the last 2 weeks than i own in total for the PS4.
The modern console gaming market is rubbish.
Are you saying NES and PS2 is the same thing? Yes, most modern games are also rubbish, but just because there are sooo insanely many of them and development tools are so widely available and accessible than every moron can go ahead and create his own FPS in a week.
However, that does not make old retro games any better. They were fun for the time, they induce strong nostalgia in us, but they are still crap from today’s perspective. Games like Tetris and Solitaire are more or less perfect, but the rest is… Well, not very good.