Nintendo doesn’t have a shortage of Nintendo Switch consoles at their disposal; they learned from the mistake of the Wii, and even with the Switch’s popularity with users all over the world there’s no trouble getting hold of one, least of all for the guys who made it. So when I discovered a video of a Twitter user by the name of ChrisMack32 unplugging a USB SNES controller in the Nintendo Museum and alerting Bob Wulff about the telltale sign of a Windows USB device being unplugged, it made me ask one question and one question only – why?
Nintendo and emulators don’t exactly go hand in hand; admittedly I’ve always thought that emulation should be for consoles that are not currently on sale and for playing and preserving the games of our youth rather than emulating titles I can buy in a store, but Nintendo has made it pretty clear that they would rather us use their Switch Online platform than pulling ROM files of their earlier works. With that in mind, it seems like an odd choice to have games running on Windows devices in their official Museum, don’t you think?
The video is pretty noisy, but if you listen you can hear the signature Windows noise playing. Obviously having multiple Super Nintendo consoles running throughout the museum would have been an absolute nightmare. Nintendo would have had to employ people armed with Q-Tips to run around telling people not to blow the cartridges and rebooting them when cartridges gave up the ghost halfway through a level. That being said, they could always have reproduced hardware and cartridges or installed NES & SNES Mini consoles for players to use rather than relying on Windows devices.
I guess it’s just easier to emulate, which is something that we’ve all known for a long time and the reason I’m playing Diddy Kong Racing on my phone using Delta. Still, if I’m in the Nintendo Museum, I’d expect to play using the real deal rather than experiencing PC emulation. Does it matter that Nintendo are emulating their own games for ease? Is it what you thought they would do to make things easier or like me, did you think that they would install either updated hardware or Switches everywhere for that authentic feel? Let me know in the comments below!
