In just over a week, leaked copies of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom have caused a degree of chaos that even Ganon would be impressed with.

In late April, I spoke with developers behind the Switch emulators Yuzu and Ryujinx about the likelihood of their emulators being able to run Tears of the Kingdom shortly after launch. The prognosis was optimistic. But then the game leaked well ahead of launch, putting the developers—as well as Nintendo—in a tense and volatile situation.

The emulation teams have forbidden all discussion of running Tears of the Kingdom from their Discord servers—Yuzu only allows vague discussion of the contents of the game, but requests for help or discussion of performance quickly earns chatters a deleted message and…