Welcome to Nintendo Library!

Nintendo Library aims to holistically catalog all Nintendo-published and Nintendo-licensed first-party multimedia, along with authentic showcases of Nintendo.

I'm rarenight, and I've been a video game librarian for a long time. My goal here is to robustly preserve the cultural phenomenon of Nintendo beyond the ROMs themselves. As someone who has been a No-Intro moderator for many years, I've found that ROMs are lacking at holistic preservation, and that we need a multimedia project focused on Nintendo miscellany. This is essentially a replacement for and an expansion of the Nintendo - Misc DAT set on No-Intro.

The goal with Nintendo Library is to preserve not just the media that Nintendo creates, but also the media that preserves the cultural zeitgeist surrounding Nintendo.

So Nintendo Library is comprised of two buckets:

Published / Licensed First-Party Multimedia:
- Media that Nintendo developed internally (e.g. Donkey Kong Bananza on Switch 2)
- Media where Nintendo signed a publishing deal (e.g. Bayonetta 2 on Wii U)
- Media where Nintendo licensed the use of its characters (e.g. Soul Calibur II on GameCube)
- Media where Nintendo signed off on an adaptation (e.g. the CoroCoro Comic Splatoon Manga)
- Media hosted on Nintendo's servers (e.g. the Nintendo Music app)

Media that authentically showcases Nintendo:
- In-depth Video Retrospectives that chronicle the history and intricacies of Nintendo (e.g. YouTube Documentaries)
- Commercials and Trailers for Nintendo hardware and games
- Nintendo Presentations (e.g. Nintendo Directs)
- Interviews with Nintendo staff (e.g. Iwata Asks)
- No-Commentary Video Playthroughs of Nintendo games (e.g. Longplay Archive)
- Noteworthy Marketing Collateral (e.g. E3 Press Kits)
- Fan Translations of Nintendo media (e.g. the Mother 3 Fan Translation)
- Publications that are dedicated to Nintendo (e.g. Magazines)
- Officially-sanctioned Tournaments (e.g. Nintendo World Championships)
- Official Shorts (e.g. the Pokemon Special Music Video)

I aim to catalog for one representative scan of print media. If there are two extant scans of the same magazine for example, I compare them to see which one is superior and remove the lower-quality one. If the set contains video media, then I archive one Blu-Ray ISO or DVD ISO if available for preservation, one Blu-Ray Rip or DVD Rip for accessibility, and one WEB-DL for an additional source in case any content is missing, censored, or corrupt in one of the sources. For video media I aim to catalog one encode in English, and one encode in the native language, if I can't find Dual Audio rips (e.g. with Pokemon).

The vast majority of the media cataloged in Nintendo Library is simply an aggregate of existing media circulating the Internet. This is due to time and funding constraints. The non-deterministic sets where items have the (Nintendo Library) tag along with the Nintendo Music set are Nintendo Library originals. Please note, there are no Nintendo Library originals for ROMs. The hashes for the ROMs in Nintendo Library are derived from No-Intro and Redump.

Nintendo Library aims to primarily archive English-language and Japanese-language media. Other languages will be included in some sets (like in Magazines and ROMs), but will be generally de-prioritized in others (like in Fan Translations and Trailers).

Nintendo Library excludes all media which is prohibitively challenging to archive, along with media which leverages Nintendo as a platform to unofficially showcase fan content and talents.

Therefore, Nintendo Library excludes all of the following:
- Non-Nintendo-related Media
- Variants of Nintendo games not published by Nintendo, like Steam ports, Remakes, and Remasters
- Nintendo-related Fan Art, like Drawings and Stories
- Nintendo-related Fan Audio, like Remixes and Podcasts
- Nintendo-related Fan Comics, like Manga and Webcomics
- Nintendo-related Fan Animation, like Music Videos and Shorts
- Nintendo-related Fan Games, like releases on Itch.io and SMBX2 games
- Commentated Video Playthroughs, like Let's Plays and Twitch Streams, as they focus more on the Talent playing than the actual games
- Nintendo-related fan competitions like Speedruns and Melee Tournaments, unless officially sanctioned by Nintendo
- Assorted Nintendo-sourced Images due to their sheer bulk, like Wallpapers and Concept Art
- Licensed Third-Party Games for Nintendo consoles that don't fit the above criteria of First-Party Multimedia
- Nintendo-related ROM Hacks, with the exception of English Fan Translations because they authentically showcase Nintendo to new audiences
- Homebrew developed to be compatible with Nintendo consoles
- User-generated content in Nintendo games, like Super Mario Maker 2 custom levels
- Low-quality Nintendo Reaction Videos, like Review Videos and News Update Videos
- Generalist Gaming Publications that don't focus on Nintendo, like Gaming News Sites
- Nintendo-related Sites, like Fan Wikis and Forums, due to the sheer challenge of ripping and maintaining them

Click here to download the latest Nintendo Library DATs.

Nintendo Library DATs are designed to be used with the ROM management software ROMVault. Nintendo Library DATs will be updated regularly in this link and in ROMVault's paid service DATVault. Please note that Nintendo Library DATs are still very much a work in progress and may evolve dramatically between each release, with files deleted and replaced on a regular basis. A few Nintendo Library DATs require the Mixed (Archive as File) setting and a File Only ToSort directory to scan properly.