Spreading around the WIRED office this week is this HTML5 Game Boy emulator built for iPhone browsers. Apple doesn’t allow unauthorized emulators on the App Store, although the relatively open nature of the store allows people to sneak them on there for a few days before they get too popular and Apple pulls them down.
But in the case of a browser-based emulator like this, there’s nothing Apple can do. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen an HTML5 Game Boy emulator intended for play on phones — one that’s gone now made the rounds in late 2012 — but this emulator at BenMidi works particularly well. It doesn’t output sound, but you can play Super Mario Land at full speed. It’s clunky and doesn’t feel one-tenth as good as playing the game with real buttons, but people will suffer through a lot of things to play games for free.
Since this particular bit of copyright infringement is out of Apple’s hands, it falls to Nintendo to swat it down, which it likely will. But this is the problem Nintendo faces: It can’t swat flies all day. If this disappears from its current home it will just pop up somewhere else later. And as these emulators get faster and smoother, they’ll become a closer and closer substitute for buying a Nintendo 3DS and downloading a copy of Super Mario Land for $3.99. It will be much harder by the day for Nintendo to charge premium prices for its legacy software when illicit emulators are this frictionless.