Amid an ongoing crackdown against game piracy and back ups, another casualty has been caused. One of the most popular sites for downloading ROMs, ISOs and emulators for retro consoles, EmuParadise, has deleted all of their game copy files per a new announcement.
The founder of 18 year-old site has announced that the site will no longer host any game files. Although the site will continue to act as a repository for emulators.
EmuParadise joins the ranks of LoveRETRO and LoveROMs as the latest casualty of an ongoing war on piracy and game backups. Nintendo filed a legal suit against the owner of those sites which resulted in them being shut down.
As the EmuParadise founder MasJ puts it:
It’s not worth it for us to risk potentially disastrous consequences. I cannot in good conscience risk the futures of our team members who have contributed to the site through the years. We run EmuParadise for the love of retro games and for you to be able to revisit those good times. Unfortunately, it’s not possible right now to do so in a way that makes everyone happy and keeps us out of trouble.
This is an extremely emotional decision for me after running this site for so many years. But I believe it is the right thing for us at this point of time.
Thus, we have decided to make a new start. We will continue to be passionate retro gamers and will keep doing cool stuff around retro games. But you won’t be able to get your games from here for now. Where we go with this is up to us and up to you.
EmuParadise has received an endless string of angry letters, legal threats and a bunch of negative press and feedback for their efforts to keep retro gaming alive for new generations of gamers. And they deserve to be commended for their efforts, even though it’s very saddening that things turned out this way. This effectively means that the site has shut down, as most of its traffic and interest was generated from it’s massive games collection.
It sucks that such an impressive and useful collection of retro games has been wiped out, but it seems like it was a necessary decision, and one that I begrudgingly agree with.
At the very least, the team will work to keep the emulator database running and to maintain the site’s community. There also may be new projects coming from them in the future. Until then, we wish them best of luck in their future efforts.
