Dreamhack is the world's largest gaming festival with events usually in Europe and the US. Its first Asian outing was in Mumbai this weekend with Dreamhack Mumbai. Aside from hosting PUBG Mobile, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Dota 2 tournaments, Dreamhack Mumbai also had a retro zone for attendees to try out older, simpler games.
This is in line with what Dreamhack[1] does in other countries like Sweden and the US, complete with actual retro hardware including consoles like the SNES and GameCube, or fully-fledged arcade cabinets. At Dreamhack Mumbai, Gadgets 360 discovered that the retro section had games like Contra from Konami, as well as Ice Climber and ExciteBike from Nintendo. However, they were in the form of ROMs — the game's code as a file, as opposed to an actual cartridge of the game — running off clone consoles dressed up to look like arcade cabinets.
You could select what game to play from a menu touting '76,000 in 1[2]' titles to choose from. That's a dead giveaway that no official cartridges were involved, considering such compilations were never officially made. This makes their legitimacy questionable at best, and at worst, a case of piracy at a high-profile event like Dreamhack.
Considering that Nintendo has been rather litigious regarding its older games, going as far as forcing shutdown of entire ROM websites[3], Gadgets 360 questioned Dreamhack Mumbai's organiser if there were any permissions taken to begin with.
"You ask and you ask again, and you keep asking till the time either someone says 'no' or says 'okay if it's just a community thing, go for it'," says Akshat Rathee CEO and Founder of Nodwin, the company organising Dreamhack Mumbai to Gadgets 360. "The fact...