Nintendo Wipes Out 400+ Switch Emulator Repos on GitHub in a Single Day
- Sagar Mankar
- 8 hours ago
- 1 min read
Nintendo has taken down over 400 Switch emulator repositories from GitHub in a single day.
The company filed 7 separate DMCA anti-circumvention notices this week, and together they wiped out an entire wave of emulator projects in one go.
The list includes copies of the Suyu emulator, a bunch of Yuzu forks, and even Skyline, an emulator that shut itself down years ago but somehow never really left. GitHub took most of these repos offline pretty quickly.
Yuzu settled in February 2024, and Ryujinx shut down that October. But their successors kept trying to keep edited versions alive, and Nintendo has been chasing them down in waves ever since.
Here's how the seven notices broke down, according to Torrentfreak:
vstyler96/suyu (suyu, the Yuzu successor) - 311 repos, full network
skyline-emu/skyline (Skyline, Android, independent) - 29 repos, full network
NicolasArvani/yuzu (Yuzu fork) - 14 repos, full network
liushuyu/yuzu-android (Yuzu Android port) - 8 repos, full network
exverge-0/yuzu-EA4176 (Yuzu Early Access build 4176) - 21 forks listed
irlbunny-archive/MonoNX (C sharp based) - 17 forks listed
IpwnedU/yuzu-master (Yuzu fork) - parent repo only
Every emulator on this week's list was technically dead already, at least once.
Getting the repos pulled from GitHub is the easy part for Nintendo. Keeping the code offline for good is the real challenge, since forks have a habit of popping back up faster than takedown notices can catch them.
It's impressive how Nintendo managed to take down over 400 repositories in one go, but the article points out the real challenge is keeping them offline. It seems like a never-ending battle, as forks of projects like Yuzu and Suyu keep popping up for those looking for unblocked games 66 or other ways to play. This "whack-a-mole" approach must be exhausting for Nintendo 🤔.