The Everdrive

I pirate all the retro games I play. It’s true, and my favorite tool for doing this is a little thing called the “Everdrive GB x3”. This is a Gameboy cartridge with a microSD card slot that allows you to store and play all your Gameboy and Gameboy Color games on one cartridge. I find that the Everdrive has many excellent uses, such as being able to play all your games in one cartridge and not having to worry about save losses. The Everdrive also makes these games more accessible to people like you who want to play these games.

One of the biggest appeals about the Everdrive is how you can store the entire Gameboy and Gameboy Color library on one cartridge. You can literally fit over 500 Gameboy and Gameboy Color games on a 4GB microSD card alone. That’s over 500 games in one, of your choosing. You can play whatever games you want without having to carry a bunch of cartridges around. The other advantage to this is being able to play all these games for free by downloading ROMs off of pirate websites.

But why would you download games from pirate sites? Well, the primary alternative to this is just buying the games off of third-party sellers, but the problem with those is that you aren’t getting a very quality-assured product. The main problem with buying old game cartridges is that if you can save your progress in the game you’re buying, your save states have a much higher risk of getting corrupted. Why? Old games like this store save data on a battery which can corrode with age, which means original carts aren’t very reliable. Some people decide to buy “repros” or reproduction carts to fix this problem, but these cartridges still rely on batteries to store save data, and they aren’t made by Nintendo so they could still be considered pirated. The Everdrive, on the other hand, uses the microSD card to store saves and then retrieves them when needed. 

Commonly overlooked when discussing these options is that neither Nintendo nor the original developers receive money for any of them, whether you got the game for free or not. Of course, Nintendo has its own official alternatives to this dilemma: Virtual Consoles and Nintendo Online. There are problems with both. For starters, you have to buy the newest Nintendo console to use these services (or you were expected to when these consoles were new). And while you got to keep any Virtual Console games you bought on your Wii, the Virtual Console store has since been discontinued, and Nintendo has put in its place Nintendo Online. Nintendo Online is a subscription service for the Nintendo Switch that is mainly used for games that have online multiplayer support. However, Nintendo Online also grants you access to a massive yet incomplete library of retro games. This sounds great, but you have to buy a Switch to use the service, and then pay a yearly fee of $20 (this is their best plan). If you have the money for a Switch, this may still sound like a good solution. However, you don’t get to choose which games are on the service, and you can’t experience these games using the hardware they were intended to be played on. (I myself looked for a Gameboy that was perfect for me, in order to get the most out of my Everdrive.) This is the primary reason I use the Everdrive to pirate old Gameboy and Gameboy Color titles. It allows me to play these old games on the original hardware, but in a convenient way.

So yes, I pirate the games I review. I don’t feel any guilt towards this though because there doesn’t seem to be a very appealing alternative. So until there is, I will continue to play my games this way.