Gen Z thinks emulating retro video games is too difficult, and while it’s obviously not as simple as loading up a console it’s nowhere near as tricky as you’d think.
Emulation is tricky business but only due to all the legal grey areas it comes with.
While the act of emulation isn’t illegal, downloading ROMs of games online is, and even when it’s your own copy that you’ve somehow downloaded to your PC, it’s hard to prove it’s actually yours.
Yet there are some gamers out there that think of emulation and picture hours upon hours of downloading, uploading, tweaking, maybe even a bit of coding just to get Super Mario 64 running on a PC, when that’s not the case at all.
Emulation is Easier Than People Think
“It’s so funny to hear that people think emulators are annoying and hard to use like bro I figured that s*** out when I was 10” read an X post by CynnamonLyn.
Another by 7Negative_Creep read “How are there people that seriously try to act like emulating games is hard? I was doing that on my ipad in 6th grade you can figure it out.”
I’m going to be one of those devils advocate people now.
I do think it can be quite daunting if you’ve never done it before.
There’s also the fear of clicking on the wrong link and downloading some dodgy virus instead of an emulator, so I can see why some gamers might be put off even trying.
Some replies to the above tweets also tried to play the devil’s advocate, like one that pointed out the difference in emulation programs.
“To be fair there’s definitely a difference between dragging a GBA ROM to a program that lets you instantly play it with no issues vs the myriad of setting tweaks that stuff like Dolphin and PCSX2 ask for each individual game.”
Others argued that they’re prone to failure, which again I can somewhat agree with as there have been plenty of times when a game simply won’t boot up and won’t tell you why.
“They can be annoying if you want them to work *right*. Sure you can drag-n-drop ALttP into a SNES emulator, but then you have to tweak several settings to get video settings right & disable filters, ensure it’s accurate, etc. It’s ironically easier to use modded hardware.”
Emulation isn’t difficult, there’s just slightly more to think about compared to consoles, and at first glance it looks more complicated than it actually is.
