SNES Emulator on Nokia Blog Draws Nintendo's Attention

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Poor Nokia, they were just trying to move units of their Nokia N900 (which was released just 10 days ago). A promotional YouTube video for the phone, which was produced by an official Nokia blogger and was linked to a Nokia blog, featured the N900 playing Nintendo games on a SNES emulator. Nintendo is investigating.

The legal stance on emulators has always been a bit of a grey area, and the current understanding is that emulators are ok, ROMs of real games aren’t. (As Gizmondo points out, the Android features a ton of emulators).

What Nokia’s guys did, is they actually mentioned that you needed the ROMs and showed their guys playing Super Mario World on the video. The Nokia employee reportedly said in the video (which has since been pulled from YouTube), “Most publishers allow individual title usage provided that the user is in possession of the original title.” Nintendo probably disagrees, considering how quickly they go after people who host Nintendo ROMS on the internet.

When euro gaming giant Edge contacted one of Nintendo of Europe’s PR reps on the story, he said that “[Nintendo] take[s] rigorous steps to protect our IP and our legal team will examine this to determine if any infringement has taken place.” You can practically hear the collective panic at Nokia from here.

Read our coverage of the Nokia N900′s release for more information on the phone. It features a full QWERTY keyboard, 32GB of memory and a 3.5″ touchscreen, plus I hear you can play SNES games on it. It’ll set you back $505 in the United States.