Legal Retro Gaming on Emulation Devices?

At the beginning of April I watch along with millions of other gamers as Nintendo unveiled their new console. They seem to have made a very powerful console this time around. However I found myself not excited for the new system given the games were mostly new IPs or titles that had been on PC for a while. They will undoubtedly charge a premium for these titles as well.

The most modern games I have enjoyed have been on PlayStation 4 and switch. Even then I have opted for lower spec’d handhelds. That is probably because lately I have been playing mostly games from the 80s and 90s. This has been magnified by two devices that I have bought over the years.

The first is the Evercade by Blaze Entertainment. Their products feature licensed games on a physical cartridge. I first got into Evercade in 2023. At that time many of the carts held some nostalgia, or held some systems that i had never played before. I had been turned on to some systems like the Commodore 64 and Commodore Amiga by the Retro Hour Podcast (UK). Blaze, being a company from the UK, was featuring these and other publishers that had little to no presence here in the US. Slowly but surely I have bought most every cartridge that they have released.

All of this wonderful nostalgia came to a grinding halt when all of Blaze’s partners in North America removed Evercade from their stores. This was due to the tariffs that the US is putting on other countries. I hope it will be only temporary, but I think there is a better than zero chance that it will become very difficult to get Evercade games/hardware in the foreseeable future.

This brings me to my second device that has really immersed me in nostalgia. I purchased a few retro-emulation handhelds recently as the site I write for was doing some reviews on them and it got me curious. The device I bought was an Anbernic RG34XXSP on eBay. It looks like a Gameboy Advance SP. They come in a variety of colors, I opted for the Super Nintendo themed device. I really like the fact I can close the device up and toss it in my bag.

Once I got started playing games on the system, I was hooked. I loaded up a bunch of games that I had owned for the Atari 7800, Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Gameboy, Game Gear, and many others. It played them all flawlessly. I realized that I was way more excited to sit down and play some Choplifter on the Atari 7800 than some other 60 dollar game on Steam, or Nintendo Switch. The thing that is unfortunate about playing on these open emulation devices is that it is all playing these emulated games in an unlicensed state. This had no impact on my enjoyment of the games I played, but it means that this is the only way to enjoy these games since no legal route exists.

My hope is that Blaze figures out its place in this new world where tariffs are a thing (for better or worse).