Wed, Jul 7th 2021 7:55pm —
Timothy Geigner
The saga of how RomUniverse, a site dedicated to offering ROMs for classic Nintendo games, came to its end is both frustrating and very dumb. Back in 2019, Nintendo launched a massive war on ROM sites, coinciding with the release of a mini version of Nintendo's NES console. Eventually, the company's sights turned to RomUniverse. Run solely by Matthew Storman, the site first tried and failed to crowdfund its legal expenses, made the lame argument that somehow the first sale doctrine meant that Storman could legally offer up digital versions of bought Nintendo games, only to see Storman represent himself in court and eventually lose. While Nintendo always had the law on its side, it was also true that sites like RomUniverse existed for a long, long time and Nintendo wasn't injured enough by any of this for it to be on the radar prior to the ROM War of 2019. In fact, I would argue that ROM sites for a long, long time kept up the interest in these classic games that created a market for Nintendo's classic console releases.