How to play retro games in your browser, legally
What an emulator is, why not every game file may be shared, and how we choose which retro games appear on the site.
Retro games run in your browser through an emulator: software that imitates the hardware of an old console such as the Game Boy or NES. The emulator is just a tool. The legal question is about the game file (the ROM) it runs.
Most old commercial games are still protected by copyright even when the console is no longer sold, so sharing them without permission is not legal. We only publish games whose authors clearly allow distribution: new homebrew games written for old consoles, open-source projects, and titles released under a licence that permits it.
Every retro game on the site has a credits block: who wrote it, which licence it uses and where it came from. If you cannot find those details for a game elsewhere, treat that as a warning sign.
A few rules of thumb: look for an author name and a licence (such as MIT or Creative Commons), check that the game is hosted by its author or a public archive, and avoid sites offering a download of an entire console library.
If you wrote a retro game and want to share it, or you spot something on the site that looks wrong, write to us through the contact page and we will check.