Terms of Use

The short version

Read anything here. Play anything here. Download any cartridge and keep it. Do not pass the games off as someone else’s work, and do not read a parody as a statement of fact. If a story is wrong here, write to us and it gets fixed.

What you may do

Read the issues, play them in the browser, and download the .nes files to run in an emulator or on real hardware. Keep them. Share them, with the credit and the link attached.

What we ask you not to do:

• Sell a cartridge, or bundle one into something you charge for, without asking first.
• Strip the credit from a ROM, a screenshot or a clip and publish it as your own work.
• Present an issue as reporting by the outlet it credits, or as a claim of fact about the people in the news story.
• Hammer the site harder than a reader would, or attempt to break into the host.

What the site is, and what it is not

Quote the news, invent the cast. The headline, the outlet’s name and the link to the original story are the source’s own, printed as attribution. Everything else — the game’s title, its characters, its art, its 6502 — is ours, and is invented. A level is satire, not reporting on the events inside it; the reporting is at the link. About sets out how an issue is made.

No real person is named or depicted as a character in a level. Where a public figure is caricatured it is in the political-cartoon tradition: a recognisable detail and a pun pseudonym that announces itself as a parody. Nothing on this site asserts that a real person did something they did not do.

Who owns what

The original work is ours: the levels, the art, the code, the ROMs and the articles written here.

The quoted material is not. A headline, an outlet’s name and a link belong to whoever published them, and appear here for attribution and comment.

The site runs on third-party software we vendor rather than load from a CDN — the jsnes emulator and a GIF encoder, both MIT. Their licences ship with the site, in vendor/NOTICE.md.

Not affiliated with Nintendo

Nintendo Entertainment System, NES and Nintendo are trademarks of Nintendo. PUNBIT is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Nintendo in any way. The cartridges here are original homebrew: our own 6502 code and our own art, written for the real hardware. No Nintendo code, ROM or artwork is included in this site or distributed by it.

No warranty

The site and the cartridges are provided as they are. An emulator is not a console: a ROM that boots here may behave differently in another emulator, on a flash cartridge, or on a particular console revision — and a browser may decline to run the player at all. Putting a ROM on your own hardware is your decision.

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for loss arising from the use of this site or the files it publishes. Nothing here is advice of any kind.

Corrections and takedown

Corrections are welcome, and are rather the point: this publishes from real reporting, so a wrong headline, date, outlet or attribution should be fixed. Write to [email protected].

The same address takes a rights or likeness complaint. Tell us the address of the issue, what specifically is wrong, and — for a rights claim — what you hold and where it was published. We would rather change a level than argue about one: if a caricature or an asset is a genuine problem, it comes down while we look at it.

Changes to these terms

When these terms change, this page changes and the date at the top of it changes with them. There is no notification list to join — the date is the record.