Nintendo might be working on an official emulator for mobile devices

The Nintendo Game Boy had long been a symbol of success for the Japanese gaming company for many, many years, and it goes without saying that many of us who grew up in the 1990s had our fair share of fond memories of the Game Boy. Well, it looks as though an official Game Boy emulator for mobile devices could be in the pipeline, according to a recent patent filing by the Japanese giant. Of course, this is not to say that there has been no Game Boy emulators running on mobile devices thus far, but those have tended to be unofficial emulators.

A new patent published by the USPTO yesterday details an invention by Nintendo that would allow it to emulate its mobile game consoles, including the Game Boy line of devices specifically, in other settings, including on seat-back displays in airplanes and trains, and on mobile devices including cell phones. The patent is an updated take on an older piece of IP, so it’s not an entirely new idea, but it’s still very interesting to consider that Nintendo could have renewed interest in the idea of running its own back catalogue on many different kinds of screens. The patent talks specifically about emulation, which is the technique by which a hardware platform is mimicked by a software application on a different type of hardware, in order to run versions of the games for said platform without requiring either the console itself, or physical cartridges. Generally, it’s been used by fan communities to play their favourite games of old on PCs, Macs and mobile devices, but in this patent Nintendo details using it for its own legitimate, licensed distribution of software.