Zelda: Breath of the Wild is one of the best reviewed games of all time, heck it is one of the best games of all time. But the only way to play it is if you got a Switch or a Wii U.
Which is why there’s a team of fans working on bringing the game to the PC via an emulator. And because of the size of Breath of the Wild, it’s quite an undertaking.
However, the team at CEMU, who are working on the emulator, have been getting lots of support from fans. Not just nice messages from fans, but actual monetary support.
When the game came out and they announced that they were working on an emulator, fans were funding them about $7,000 per month. Now that number has skyrocketed to $23,000 a month from 5,400 fans.
The emulator is based on the Wii U version of the game, which was released alongside the Switch version earlier this month.
Here’s a video of Breath of the Wild running on PC via the CEMU emulator in its current state. The frame rate is quite choppy, but that’s something that can be fixed with optimization down the line.
For comparison, here’s a previous version of the game running emulated on PC, version 1.7.3. It’s clear that in just a couple of weeks, there have been substantial frame rate improvements.
Nintendo hasn’t commented on this particular project, but the company doesn’t like emulators in general (for obvious reasons).
