In celebration of the Neo Geo arcade platform’s 25th anniversary, Humble Bundle released a bundle yesterday that contains a collection of Japanese developer SNK’s arcade classics purportedly ported to PC platforms by a Paris-based studio named DotEmu, including entries from the Metal Slug series, the King of Fighters series, Twinkle Star Sprites, and Neo Turf Masters. The bundle sparked controversy, however, when Twitter user Foxhack unpacked the .exe file for Art of Fighting 2 and discovered strings of code that indicated the game was built on torrented ROMs and bios (which contain all of the data needed to make the game run). He also discovered data for an emulator called Nebula, which was used by former French online video game distribution service Gametap (who was acquired by another French service called Metaboli in 2008), as well as the Gametap logo itself.

@DotEmu is still a horrible company. This was found inside one of their Neogeo "ports" sold by @humble. Disgusting. pic.twitter.com/TbxlOFmJXN

— Foxhack / Dave Silva (@Foxhack) December 8, 2015

Last one for today, I promise. If you've ever downloaded MAME torrents, you'll understand the comment on the side. pic.twitter.com/BP2tB32da7

— Foxhack / Dave Silva (@Foxhack) December 9, 2015

The news upset many fans on the Internet, who accused DotEmu of piracy.

In an attempt to allay gamers’ concerns, DotEmu later released a statement clarifying that they legally obtained the components needed to run the bundle’s games: the ROMs were provided by SNK (who developed the Neo Geo hardware), while the Nebula emulator was purchased from Gametap themselves.

More than a year ago, we bought 100% of the rights to use Gametap’s emulator Nebula, along with many other emulators. Legal emulation is and has always been our core activity. We acquired legally Nebula in order to integrate it in our own emulation engine and technologies, on which we have worked for several years. Nebula has the advantage of being compatible with a huge range of Neo Geo ROMS and shows very good performances on the majority of the emulated games.

All the ROMS and game engines we use are approved and validated by their owners, our friends at SNK. And like all our previous work with them, everything is 100% legal, and will always be.

Many individuals who had previously accused DotEmu of theft have since issued apologies and corrections.

It turns out they bought it, which I didn't know. I probably owe @DotEmu a very public apology, based on how viral my tweet went.

— Frank Cifaldi (@frankcifaldi) December 9, 2015

TL;DR – @dotemu says they licensed the emulator from Gametap. DotEmu just built the UI for the release.

— Foxhack / Dave Silva (@Foxhack) December 9, 2015

For those interested in the Neo Geo bundle, there are just 12 hours left to claim it. The bundle’s page can be found here, and Humble Bundle’s recommended system specs for playing the games can be found here.

The games included in the bundle can be played DRM-free via an in-browser emulator assembled by DotEmu in the Humble Bundle link above, or through the popular emulation app Multi Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME). Only one game – The King of Fighters 2002 Ultimate Match – requires a Windows PC and Steam to play. Some gamers speculate that the rest of the games included in the bundle may be available for Steam at some point in the future, considering how many of them were included in the Steam registry leak last Sunday. Whether or not this theory turns out to be true will likely be seen in the coming months.