Senseless

You know, when you have a major contributor to the emulation scene, a community which is nowhere near as healthy as it was twenty years ago, a good idea would be to not chip away at that keystone with mockery and harassment until it falls apart and takes the whole damn structure down with it. Yet here we are.

I'm talking of course about Near, who coded emulators like Higan and Ares, and was repaid for their hard work and coding skill with constant cruelty that ultimately convinced them that life was not worth living. I'm sure most gamers wouldn't dream of subjecting someone to that kind of torment and cutting their own throats in the process. To the few who would... congratulations? I'm not sure what you thought you were trying to accomplish, but you sure did that thing you set out to do. That pointless, senseless, counterproductive thing that cost someone their life and robbed everyone else of their talent.

If Near never developed another emulator, translated another game, or wrote a single line of code again but remained alive, I would have been comfortable with that. Near didn't owe the emulation scene jack shit, and the scene, as weak as it is in 2021, probably could have scraped by without them. But let's look at this from another angle. What if this had happened twenty five years ago, to the creators of NESticle, or MAME, or ZSNES? Think of how profoundly that tragedy would have affected this hobby, and you in particular. All those obscure Japanese games you discovered in the 1990s, all the knowledge that was revealed about prototypes that were covered in magazines but never released, all that extra love you currently have for video games, would be gone in a blink. You'd be cheated out of that experience, all because a handful of nobodies drove someone to suicide for their own petty amusement. 

This couldn't have happened in the 1990s... things were different then, and the internet was not so overbearingly ubiquitous. Just remember that in another time, under different circumstances, so much could have been taken from you, for so little.