Interview with Seph from RomUlation - 2007/10/30

The following interview was made on: 2007/10/30​

Interview with Seph from RomUlation​

As I am sure you are all aware RomUlation, one of, if not the biggest rom sites was recently given a cease and desist notice from the Entertainment Software Association, essentially closing down the site. What does this mean for the gaming community at large? We ask Seph, the founder of RomUlation.

“I’m 19 years old and working as a part-time PHP programmer, the other part of my work hours I spend on various Internet related projects; RomUlation being one of those. I started out my web career doing work for other people while working on re-launching a highly improved version of RomUlation. When it finally got done I stopped doing work for other people and focused instead on my own project. Along the way some more ideas fermented in my which I am now working on; they’re still a few months away from total realization - RomUlation took up a lot of development time.


What made you start RomUlation?

“I don’t remember really; RomUlation initially started more than 5 years ago as a very amateurish website with static html pages and uploads to Yahoo Groups. I don’t think I can brag about having had some noble purpose for starting RomUlation. I was quite naive back then and I suppose I merely liked being able to play N64 games on my PC and wanted to share my joy with others. My parents had this crazy idea that I couldn’t have an N64 because I already had a PlayStation. Obviously no child should ever have to face that horror.

My reasons changed with time though; it’s no longer just about the philosophy that “sharing is caring”. I suppose it’s more about showing that today’s business models are outdated and don’t work anymore, it’s tiring to buy a game only to find out an hour later that you should rather have spent the money on that other game. I honestly don’t think I’d keep RomUlation running if Nintendo made it easy to download demos and full games and use them with a flash cart; well at least not the download aspect. I’d probably still run the forum and the community.”


RomUlation has grown massively over the last year or so, it’s a big site to manage on your own. Do you get much help from other people?

“I don’t think “massively” quite covers the growth rate we’ve experienced with RomUlation. We got from 500 visitors per day to 25,000 in about 10 months and managed to push 241mbit/sec at our peak. I’d like to say that I managed it all alone but I can’t take that credit. I had help from a lot of people really. A friend of mine through quite some time, Loonylion, who’s also an admin of the site, is a network engineer - he helped me with server management and such. I’ve picked up on most of it now so I’m capable of doing basic maintenance but he still helps out if we need custom software compiled for the server. Then there’s Patton, our host guy who helped us in negotiating our hosting and showed us the ins and outs of the industry, I don’t know where we’d be today if it weren’t for his contacts and hosting guidance. Lastly of course, there are the forum moderators and the community. The community is really what makes the site; it’s them who create the content, aside from the downloads. Without them, RomUlation really wouldn’t be half of what it is.”


Tell me about when you received the cease and desist notice from the ESA.

“The cease and desist notice was actually a DMCA notice so it was more or less directed at our host instead of me so it wasn’t really too shocking. I merely got a notice from the hosting company that they wouldn’t be putting the server back online as long as the RomUlation domain pointed to it.
They had attached the email they got from the ESA and it was pretty much just a standard DMCA notice, rather boring.”


Do you think the closure of RomUlation means that other rom sites will be closed down soon?

“It’s hard to say; I doubt that ROM sites in general are in danger, perhaps some of the larger ones. It’s easy to prevent though - just don’t host in the US, then the ESA will have to go through hoops instead of just the usual DMCA notice. As to whether or not that’s a wise decision, I can’t say. It might just annoy them enough to take it a step further.

Regardless though, there will always be sites: they might be small, they might upload to lousy free hosts such as RapidShare and Megaupload but at least the files will be available. Even if they do manage to get the majority of ROM sites shut down then there’s still IRC, Usenet and P2P.”


Is see you are opening up the forums again, do you believe RomUlation can make a come back?

“Yes I believe we can make a come back. In retrospect I think I might have exaggerated our death a bit, but hindsight is always 20/20. We plan to start a torrent tracker which should make up for the missing HTTP downloads to some extent. I can’t say if we’ll ever have HTTP downloads though, I’ll have to investigate with a lawyer before I’ll make such a decision.

Despite not having HTTP downloads, I still see a bright future for RomUlation; an overwhelming amount of people have expressed their wishes to bring back the community. It’s actually quite ironic that the activity level in our IRC channel has more than doubled since we closed down the site; that’s not really what I had expected but it was a nice surprise.”


Do you have any other projects on the go?

“I have two projects in the works: one is my own personal project involving comics. I can’t say more at this point since it’s not really progressed that far and I don’t want someone to steal my idea; it’s too good to allow it to slip away.

The other project is a collaborative effort between myself and one of the owners of zShare; it’s basically a torrent search engine with a user collaboration aspect, users will be able to share their favourite torrents and have new torrents suggested based on that. It’s quite an advanced project which involves a C backend for the spider and a PHP front-end for the search engine and community part. I think it’ll be popular though, take torrents and mix in my previous experiences with communities and user friendliness, bake at 200 degrees for 20 minutes and hopefully it ends up good.”


In your spare time do you play games, if so what are your favorites?

“I used to play games; I started playing games at the age of 3 back when the family PC had a turbo button to increase it to an amazing 33MHz. Nowadays I spend more time taking part in the PHP community and working on my websites. I didn’t outgrow gaming though; I still do game once in a while. When I do, I usually play Urban Terror which is an FPS game which was originally a Quake 3 mod but has now gone stand-alone. I really wouldn’t play any other game on my PC. Most of the new games are boring and focus too much on graphics rather than game play and innovation. Besides that I also enjoy my Wii, or rather, I probably will when they release some games worth playing. ”


Do you have a favourite console or computer?

“My Wii, probably. Sadly it’s not very active at the moment, I have a butt load of games for it (downloaded of course) but only 3 of those games I found worth my money; sadly I’ve already completed all of them so I’m really just waiting for some new games to enter my download queue.”


Is there anything else you would like to share with our readers.

“I’d like to remind users to buy games; I know that sounds odd coming from someone who runs a ROM site, but I believe it’s important to make a statement that we’re not just rebellious communists who want everything handed to us on a silver platter. I’d hate to think people download games because they’re too cheap to pay for the games even though they like them and are entertained by them for hours on end. If you download a game and find yourself addicted, then go buy the game. If we don’t then we’re no better than the big corporations, and I’d hate to think that we’ve sunk to that level.

Sharing is caring but if we don’t share with developers who produce good products then eventually there won’t be any games to share.”


Seph, www.romulation.net



Source: www.nds-emulation.com/2007/10/30/interview-with-seph-from-romulation/

 

Re: Interview with Seph from RomUlation

WoW... RomUlation was on the brink of closure?

 

Seems like it.

 

Re: Interview with Seph from RomUlation

"one of, if not the biggest rom sites was recently given a cease and desist notice from the Entertainment Software Association,"

I guess thats why.

 

Well luckely it wasnt closed.

 

Re: Interview with Seph from RomUlation

omg i almost had a heartattack....
thought romu was gonna close..

this site is so good and easy to use to test a game to see if it's worth the money and than just buy it

keep up the good work romu^^

 

Re: Interview with Seph from RomUlation

You almost had a heart attack just from that? I love RomUlation but I'm not so crazy as to almost get a heart attack.

Then how did it rise from it's grave?

 

Re: Interview with Seph from RomUlation

Do you think that they'll try to close it again Loonylion?

 

Well it isnt now.

 

Re: Interview with Seph from RomUlation

I see... But how did you get the DMCA notice in the first place?

 

Re: Interview with Seph from RomUlation

Is this what you were talking about, Seph?

By the way, This forum is from Simple Machines Forums, right?

 

Well i clearly posted the date above.

 

Re: Interview with Seph from RomUlation

So what do you think about people like these? People who don't bother reading first, people who exaggerate so much like "OMG ROMU IS CLOSING DOWN IM DYING!!!"?

 

Those are the people that dont bother to read the date.

 

Re: Interview with Seph from RomUlation

they should read the first post.