Near, a prominent and exceptionally talented figure for video game emulation whose work gave us the SNES emulator bsnes, tragically passed away over the weekend.
This is a content warning for mentions of suicide.
Two years ago, Near announced that they were leaving emulation behind as "a series of escalating privacy intrusions and targeted Internet harassment" severely affected their mental health and they required professional help. A thread of Tweets relaying how they had been relentlessly bullied online was posted on June 27th, detailing that the campaign of abuse from Kiwi Farms users had not stopped in spite of their decision to step away from the limelight. Héctor Martín Cantero, a hacker famous for reverse engineering the Nintendo Wii, received a message from a mutual friend stating that Near had died by suicide.
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Also known as byuu and Dave, the developer started their career in seeking out Japanese video game ROM images and translating their content. Then, they developed a tool for displaying resized text fonts in games and their next creation was a patching assembler called "xas." As a result of these three pursuits, the bsnes emulator was born, and thanks to Near's efforts to decap SNES chips, the program worked with every single title out there for the retro platform. This was a massive milestone for those interested in video game preservation as the industry hasn't categorised itself as a producer of cultural artefacts. Consequently, a lot of amazing games are lost to history. If you didn't know who Near was before now, you can likely see how much of an impact they have had on retro gaming today.
On their own website, they described themselves as a person who had a "strong desire to understand everything, and an overwhelming drive to achieve perfection," and this was only reflected in their work to localise Bahamut Lagoon. "I have attempted this fan translation five times," they told Vice in an interview earlier this year. "The reason I've started over each time was because I learned more, and felt I could do better. The reason I've released this fifth attempt is because I no longer believe there's anything left that can be improved upon."
There are various resources that can help provide mental health support, such as Samaritans:
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