“And you can’t get copies of it in the shops. “If the game is no longer available in the market,” Bambauer adds. But if it’s the only way to play the game – the Genesis (or Mega Drive in the UK) for example wouldn’t work on most people’s TV sets – then there isn’t really a huge legal issue.īut am I committing shoplifting, something that my 12-year-old self was too cowardly to do? The answer is ‘not really’ as it’s highly unlikely a company, like Nintendo or Sega, would sue an end user like me and I have a fair-use defense that I’m not depriving these firms of revenue. In fact downloading, say, Madden 21 is akin to getting torrents of a new film –– the file size would be huge (I honestly have never done this, but I’m sure it would be massive). If the spirit were a codified document, then it would state: thou shall not download a game that is still in publication, so owning anything that deprives a copyright holder of some income is a big ‘no-no’. Emulating anything newer is impossible and not in the ‘spirit’ of retro gaming.

However, anyone can download ROMs for more modern machines, such as the PlayStation 2, but the file sizes will be larger (Final Fantasy X is 3.2GB). As you can tell my gaming sweet spot is the 90s and I write extensively about this period for publications, such as Retro Gamer, which involves me downloading a lot of pre-2000 titles.

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