Nintendo's Yuzu lawsuit puts emulation in the spotlight | Opinion

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The name Nintendo conjures up many different associations for different people. Most of those are probably centred around nostalgia and fun, which is exactly what the company would want you to associate its name with; but in recent years, the association with the word "litigious" has become increasingly strong.

Much like the golden-era Disney whose strategies Nintendo so often seems to study, Nintendo is a corporation fronted by cute, colourful characters, but backed up by an army of expensive lawyers who swing a heavy legal hammer at any sign of threat to the company's products, IPs, and brands. This aggressive legal approach can be extremely heavy-handed, especially when its sights are turned on harmless fan projects; those instances tend to be widely reported and certainly change people's perceptions of the company somewhat. The mental image of Princess Peach turning up to your house late at night wearing a balaclava and menacing you with a sock full of coins is hard to shake.

I have a hunch, though, that Nintendo doesn't mind at all having an image as a litigious company with a heavy-handed legal team. If anything, it probably benefits them when there's a wave of stories about their lawyers shutting down a fan project or pushing for immensely heavy penalties in a legal case – it's unlikely to have much impact on sales of the company's games, and it might dissuade others from deciding to tussle with Nintendo in the first place. In the company's decades-long fight with piracy (and emulation generally, which it clearly sees as being essentially the same as piracy), having a reputation for carrying a big stick can't hurt.

Yet for all that everyone knows Nintendo's lawyers are essentially the final boss of the entire games business, there are still plenty of people willing to tussle – whether it's because of the significant potential profits from piracy of Nintendo's games, or (as is more common