This essay is me waxing poetic about the benefits of ethical emulation and piracy, without much justification aside from feeling. All opinions contained herein are solely my opinion, and this work is not influenced by anyone else. This does not constitute legal advice.
Why do we devote our time to archeology? Why do humans spend time digging up the bones of the long dead, only to learn about their lifestyles through their skeletons? There are wonderful things to be learned by explorations of the past, there are beautiful things to be gleaned from them. The cost of retro gaming has slowly become more and more prohibitive, and as it climbs I see more and more people turning to the far better alternative, not only for your wallet but for your soul, emulation. A good copy of one of my favorite PlayStation 1 games could be close to $60. Legend of Mana is a fucking amazing game, and I personally believe that everyone who values a good JRPG should play at least some of it. It's got amazing systems of crafting, it's storytelling is unique in that the player character is hardly ever the protagonist, merely a vessel in which the player interacts with the world. You're not playing a silent protagonist, you can make choices in dialogue, but your character has the events happen around them, they do not make the events happen themselves. Now, if that sounds interesting to you, would you like to pay someone an exorbitant amount of money for a secondhand PlayStation which may or may not work, one that you may be required to pay more money to fix yourself or to pay someone else to fix, and then an additional $60 or so dollars to a potentially seperate person for a secondhand copy of the game which may or may not work, and if an optical disk of that age gets scratched, good fucking luck. Yeah, it got remastered recently and the remaster is amazing, and you should pay for that. But if Legend of Mana had never been remastered, never been even rereleased, just left behind like other games, your only option would've been to emulate/pirate the game. Emulation is not illegal. It's the piracy that is. I'm personally sure you've heard that 'piracy is not a victimless crime' before, but when the people you're stealing from wouldn't have seen a damn dime from the purchase you're making, you might as well just forgoe any money. There are entire internet databases dedicated to archiving .iso files for old game discs, ROM files for cartridges, just to make sure we don't lose out on gaming history. Emulation is a wonderful way not only to experience something you may have not otherwise, but also to interact with the long history of gaming since the advent of Tennis for Two. It's awful to think that we could one day lose out on playing games that are integral to the game design philosophies of today. There may come a day when there are no working NES consoles left, and no parts to fix them. There may come a day where every Super Mario Bros. cartridge is corrupted. What will we do then? We will emulate.