If game companies won't embrace emulation themselves, this kind of thing will have to do... (credit: Frank Cifaldi)
For years now, "emulation" has been a dirty word in the video game industry, regarded by many companies as nothing more than an illegal, piracy-fueling technology that represents an existential threat to the gaming business. In a passionate presentation at the Game Developers Conference this week, though, gaming historian and developer Frank Cifaldi made a well-reasoned case for the industry at large to embrace emulation as a way to capture its heritage.
"I think emulation has gotten a bad rap over the years," Cifaldi said. "I think our industry and consumers have a really bad misconception of what emulation is. Emulation is just software that makes a computer act like a different computer."
Cifaldi traces emulation's bad reputation in the game industry back to a 1999 Macworld conference keynote by the late Steve Jobs. Saying that he wanted to make the Mac "the best game machine in the world," Jobs introduced the Connectix Virtual Game Station, a $49 piece of third-party software that "turns your Mac into a Sony PlayStation."
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