14 DAY TRIAL // Nintendo has filed a DMCA with GitHub, asking the source code repository to remove a project that allowed users to play various older Nintendo games via their browser.
GitHub complied with the request last week, and today the GBA project is nowhere to be found on GitHub's servers, as per TorrentFreak.
Nintendo's DMCA notice with GitHub cited 41 infringed patents, applied to 32 Game Boy Advance games.
Additionally, the user jsemu has also disappeared, but it's unknown whether he deleted his account on his own or GitHub's admins might have had something to do about it.
Blame HTML5 & JavaScript, leave the GitHub user alone
As JavaScript and HTML5 slowly evolved through the years, projects like Emscripten started allowing developers to emulate more and more complex technologies inside the browser via plain ol' JavaScript.
This has led to a resurgence of older game emulators, projects started by programmers that wanted to play the games of their childhood again.
The problem is that most of the times developers rarely think of legal rights when deploying these kind of emulators online, and if by some means they get too popular, they tend to rub most of the gaming companies the wrong way.
If you'd like to see what all the fuss was about, and maybe even take some games for a spin, the Wayback Machine has them archived on its servers.
In addition, you can take other Nintendo emulators for a spin, like JSGB and JSNES, or check out IodineGBA, the GBA source code, but without all the Game Boy files.
Nintendo President Satoru Iwata dead at 55, and our fascination with our past
People's fascination with anything related to their childhood is a well-known psychological condition, and that's why when today Nintendo announced Satoru Iwata, its President since 2002, has died from a bile duct complication, the news become a worldwide trending topic.
Twitter users started crediting him for all kinds of works and games, which predated his tenure as President, Mr. Iwata being famous for developing the Wii console, not some of the old games and platforms people were mentioning in their tweets.
This can be the exact same reason (fascination is the better word) why users like jsemu create these kinds of old gaming platform emulators, with the intent of bringing back a small piece of their childhood, and certainly not to infringe on Nintendo's patents.