Last night, William and I went shopping for a Erin’s Christmas gift. We were only half successful, unfortunately. Then, we decorated the gingerbread house. (as some of you may already be aware) I saw something that kind of made me think though.

There was this guy selling those nintendo game in a controller knockoff things at the mall. It’s quite a technical achievement, 7600 games stored on a single controller, and it comes with a light gun, and second controller too, for less than $70.

Here’s the thing though - the reason it’s so cheap is because the manufacturer of the device does not own the copyright to any of the games. They didn’t pay a license fee to Nintendo (and epyx, and activision, and namco, and data east etc.) to include the games on the controller. Now, it’s quite a neat toy, and well worth the money if many of those games appeal to you as a nostalgia gamer, but the problem is that it just feels wrong. Somehow it makes it ok to pirate the games if you buy this device. Don’t get me wrong - I’ve downloaded my share of roms in the past, but when I did it, I knew that it wasn’t strictly legal. At the end of the day though, nobody was out any money, and the only person gaining was me (in theory.) Selling them though, is somehow abhorrent. I’d probably even buy/ask for the stupid thing if it came with no games, and some way to copy roms from your computer to the device, since I’d be paying for the actual hardware *only* and not the software that had been pirated for profit. I’d probably then go out and download 7600+ games off the internet, and have essentially the same device. I don’t really know how to explain that it’s different, but to me, it just is.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “No one who speaks German could be an evil man.” - Homer