Emulation Zone

» see emulationzone.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Emulation Zone has a precise birthday because it printed one on its own front page: "Serving the console emulation and gaming communities since 8/28/96". It began, by the founder's own account, "as a bet amongst friends to see who could come-up with the best website". Whatever the friends did with their entries, he kept updating his for a decade.

What it became was infrastructure for a scene that had no institutions. The console sections indexed emulators by machine, from the NES and Master System up through the N64 and PlayStation. Around them sat the parts that made it a hub instead of a list: hosted fan-made games, a front ends directory for the people who wrote launcher software, a savestate archive holding a NESticle movie collection and a NeoRage one, and hosting for other people's projects. SSRG and Emulinks both lived on the Zone, as did a small Sonic site called SonicHQ.

The staff page described a non-profit organization of "over twenty or so academically preoccupied staff members", which is an accurate description of what ran the emulation web in the late nineties: students with free hosting time and strong opinions about accuracy. The stated goal was "to provide the public with pure, raw information that they can use, (with a spinkle of ROMs.)" The typo is theirs and has been sitting there for a quarter of a century.

~ the dossier ~

~ the ultrahle panic ~

The farewell post mentions, in passing, that the site "even survived the great UltraHLE debacle, in which a perfect N64 emulator was released during a time in which the N64 was Nintendo's flagship console." That is a one-line summary of the most dangerous moment the emulation web had. UltraHLE arrived in 1999 and ran commercial N64 games on a Pentium II, which moved emulation from a hobby about dead hardware to a legal problem about a console still on shelves.

Wolan lists, among the things ten years taught him, that he "faced legal threats" and "dealt with the attacks of hackers". He also mentions, without elaborating, that he once had a buy-out offer. A site that hosted ROM-adjacent material through 1999 was making a weekly decision about how much risk to carry, and plenty of its contemporaries are no longer readable at all.

~ two retirements ~

He tried to leave once before. There is a page still live titled "Andy's Retirement Statement", announcing that on 28 August, after five years, he would step down as head of the site, citing grad school and the difficulty of running a website alongside a job and a masters. By his own description he came back "shortly afterwards" and kept working in a limited capacity, because the sites he was leaving behind were not in an acceptable state.

The second attempt stuck. On 20 December 2006 he posted "All Good Things..." and opened with the observation that the site had just turned ten. The reason given is unusually plain for a shutdown notice: "I have grown tired of the genre and whole heartedly want to move on to do other things. And for that reason, my second retirement will stick." He signed it Andy Wolan, NO CARRIER, Founder of Emulationzone.org, and that is the last entry on the updates page.

~ still serving ~

The notice included a condition rather than a date: "The site will remain up as long as ZTNET can afford to do so." ZTNET could. Twenty years on, emulationzone.org answers with the same front page, spaced-out letters in the headers, a streaming audio link, a hit counter pointed at a service that no longer exists, and an affiliate list leading to dead domains. The headlines feature is broken and says so. The console sections carry a note that they are discontinued and kept for reference.

That is why this is filed dormant and dated 20 December 2006 instead of whenever the hosting finally lapses. The editorial life ended on a Wednesday before Christmas; the file serving has carried on for two decades past it.

In 1999 I was on a 33.6k line in Turkey and emulators were the most compelling argument the internet had made so far: the machines in question had never been sold where I lived, and now the games ran on a PC. Sites like this one were where the news and the files were, and the reason I can read its goodbye today is that nobody turned the server off. Twenty years of hosting somebody decided not to cancel is a strange, generous kind of monument.

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