Nintendo Shuts Down Browser Based Game Boy Emulator

Nintendo asked GitHub to remove a Game Boy Advance emulator and games, hosted on the developer platform GitHub.

The website in question offered JavaScript-powered versions of many popular titles including Advance Wars, Dragon Ball Z, Super Mario Advance, Pokemon Emerald and The Sims 2.

While fans may like it, Nintendo sees the site as blatant copyright infringement.

“Nintendo requests that GitHub, Inc., disable public access to the web site at http://jsemu.github.io/gba/,” Nintendo writes in their takedown notice.

“This web site provides access to unauthorized copies of Nintendo’s copyright-protected video games and videos making use of Nintendo’s copyrighted Pokémon characters and imagery in violation of Nintendo’s exclusive rights.”

Nintendo’s takedown noticeShortly after GitHub received the takedown notice the Game Boy Advance emulator was shut down. The user who hosted the files also appears to have removed his GitHub account, possibly to avoid any further trouble.

The above means that nostalgic Game Boy Advance fans will have to dust off their old consoles again or find another way to play their classics.

Interestingly, the code for the Game Boy Emulator itself, without the pre-loaded games, is open source and still hosted elsewhere on GitHub. Several copies of the full site are also still floating around.

This is not the first time that Nintendo has gone after a Game Boy emulator. The same happened with the popular iOS application GBA4iOS, which the company nuked in a similar fashion last year.