Emulation is a great but time consuming hobby to get into. Legality be damned, it’s a pastime that has persisted even in today’s harsh corporate-controlled anti-piracy climate. Though emulation gets an unfair reputation as being nothing but torrents and game-collecting pirates swapping ISOs, there is a real legitimate reason to value emulation. That reason? It brings back classic games that people would have not been able to play otherwise.

Such is the case with yesterday’s release of N20: Nitrous Oxide. While it just looks like a clever re-skin of Tempest, it’s also a Playstation 1 game running on steam courtesy of emulation.

Now, it could be said this is nothing new, since DOSbox has been powering the 16bit PC games that fill up both GOG and Steam, but things are a little different with console games. A lot of these old PC games are held by people who, up until recently, weren’t too concerned about their distribution. Console games? That’s a bit different. Still, this game has the blessing of its copyright holders and is being put out by an outfit going by the name of Console Classics.

Amusingly, there are other games available on their site, including the cult classic Koudelka, which was the actual first game in the Shadow Hearts series of RPGs.

Could this open the way to other emulated console games making it to Steam? Besides Square’s mobile-to-PC ports of their older Final Fantasy games, we haven’t seen much in the way of classic consoles games on the service. Perhaps this new publisher may change that. If so, are there any games you’d like to see get this treatment?