Vimm posted a rather troubling message to their board a couple days ago, saying they'd been DMCA'd by Nintendo and would be removing 717 titles from their vault. Well, it turns out the so-called "takedown notice" was originated by an unaffiliated troll who had just searched the entirety of the website for the letterstrings, "mario" and "zelda", accidentally ensnaring several instances of "marion" and "marionette" at the same time. Unlike Nintendo, who pay people to do this kind of thing and would not make such an obvious mistake, this troll simply copypasted the automatically-generated list into an email, claimed to be a representative of Nintendo, and sent it off, expecting to cause confusion and delay.
First, let's talk about what would have happened if this had been a real emergency. First of all, 717 games hardly describes Vimm's entire vault. This number sounds far more consistent with games developed and/or published by Nintendo, itself. I talked about this briefly in reference to jailbreaking a Wii U—assuming Vimm's vault contains all games released for the stated available consoles, this would amount to 34,070 individual titles. While a loss of all Nintendo-developed games from the collection would be noticeable, it would not affect the website as a whole. People on Tumblr were responding to the posting with things like "Vimm's has been shut down" or "Vimm's Lair is gone". Well, no. Even if the takedown notice had been genuine, the website would still be operating, only with 717 fewer games.
However, there's another thing at work here that we can't ignore. Even though this particular takedown was troll fakery, the very real possibility exists that Nintendo will issue a real one very soon. How do I know this? Because of loose-lipped deckswabs blabbing directly to Nintendo on ElonNet. People have been trying to one-up Nintendo on Twitter and Facebook for literal decades by responding to their posts with the names of the pirate sites where they intend to download Nintendo's games for free. Sorry to tell you this, but responding to the official notice of a new Zelda game with "L + ratio + you suck + going to vimm.net" isn't as humbling as you think it is. All you've done is alert Nintendo to the existence of a website that their legal department needs to draft a DMCA notice for. Frankly, I'm surprised that Vimm's is still around, considering how many startup software pirates there are tumbling down the cliffs of Mt. Stupid. The first rule of media preservation of any kind is that old World War II slogan: "Loose lips sink ships".
So, no; even though Vimm's Lair is not currently in any danger, they will be, and much faster than you think. Are there other websites where you can get ROMs from? Of course there are. Despite being aware of it, I personally never used Vimm's for anything; I got all of my ROMs from a collection of different websites, none of which am I going to discuss here.
--16 May 2024--