Nintendo is taking its war against ‘Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’ emulators to the end

Nintendo is still engaged in an all-out fight against unauthorized copies of ‘The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’. The leak before the game was released for sale has not damaged its spectacular sales in the least, but the inferior technical power of Nintendo Switch opens a new avenue of discussion: is the company legitimized (morally, at least) to prevent players from testing the game in the best conditions technological possible?

‘Tears of the Kingdom’ only works on PC with the help of a key that allows you to run the game, an emulator is not enough. Programs like Lockpick are responsible for skipping that code request, so Nintendo has taken new steps, asking the collaborative development platform Github to delete the Lockpick and Lockpick_RCM repositoriesas well as 80 posts related to the subject that have been produced in that environment.

Officially Lockpick is used to run games in better conditions and improve the performance of game code like ‘Tears of Kingdom’ with debugging utilities like hactool, LibHac, and ChoiDujour, and force the game, for example, to run at a constant 60 fps. Nintendo considers that they are used especially to bypass the protections of the game and, therefore, violate the copyright of the manufacturers. To do this, they rely on Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the famous DMCA.

Nintendo Against Unauthorized Copying

The threats from Nintendo undoubtedly have the desired effect: the developers of the Skyline emulator, which lets you run Nintendo Switch games on Android, they have halted the development of their project. Their emulator requires encryption keys obtained through Lockpick, and they fear being accused of infringing Nintendo’s intellectual property.

But this is only the last gasp of a feverish struggle that goes back a long way in time, but obviously, it has been accentuated with the issue of pirated copies of the latest ‘Zelda’. A few weeks ago we knew of a streamer who had been banned from Twitch for commenting on a ‘Tears of the Kingdom’ video that turned out to be a gameplay from an Australian media outlet that had access to a copy of preview.

And although there are those who circumvent Nintendo’s surveillance, like that local Argentine television that broadcast nothing less than ‘Super Mario Bros. The Movie’, skipping all kinds of legal prerogatives, Nintendo lurks with continuous lawsuits. One of the most recent a fine to the French operator Dstorage of almost half a million euros for refusing to remove unauthorized copies of their games on their servers.

Nintendo’s persecution also includes individual users: the company tracked down a player who downloaded a copy of ‘Tears of the Kingdom’ via a torrent file using BitTorrent. In the notification from the user’s internet company, Nintendo advises that through the DMCA they can take legal actionsince they know exactly under what circumstances and through which IP it obtained the file.

Header: Nintendo

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