If you’ve played Wii or GameCube games on the PC, chances are it was because of the Dolphin emulator. Rachel Bryk, one of the emulator’s most active contributors, has passed away. Since the news hit, the community has been sharing memories and mourning.
Dolphin is what’s allowed fans to see games like Super Mario Galaxy and other Nintendo games from the previous eras in high-definition. It’s pretty amazing, and while certainly a bit of a grey area, there’s no denying the passion behind Dolphin and the people who’ve crafted it.
Bryk was one of those developers.
The community hub for Dolphin released a brief statement on Saturday:
It’s hard to believe that just two years ago, Rachel was reluctant to submit changes to the emulator at all due to being relatively inexperienced. But over the course of two years, she spent a considerable amount of time working on what she loved, becoming the tenth most active developer over the time period.
She often would do a lot of the drudge work that no one else would do and attempt features that no one else had time to work on. Much of her time in Dolphin was dedicated to giving TASers the tools they needed to be able to make ridiculous videos pushing games to and past their absolute limits. Without her dedicated work, it’s very likely that Wiimote TASing would not have become stable enough for general usage as it is now. She was also responsible for improvements in savestates, netplay, the user interface, configuration, and more.
TAS, by the way, means means tool assisted speedrun. Bryk was a part of ensuring speedrunners could use Dolphin and have their times recorded accurately and authoritatively.
Several members of the Dolphin development team released statements, as well.
I’m not exactly sure what you want us to do from now on — I can’t speak for you Rachel. But I wish that you’re comfortable and happy wherever you are now, and we all promise to do everything we can to help make that happen. Anyway, thank you Rachel. I’ll never forget you. You were a good friend. — Jasper
Rachel was more than just a great programmer. She was a great programmer who always managed to put a smile on my face. I don’t think that there ever will be anyone else quite like her. Rest in peace — Stevoisiak
No matter what, she was always willing to help anyone. Of all the devs she was the most helpful on the forums, always pitching in. Dolphin is a smaller place without her.. — MaJoR
Bryk’s favorite game was apparently a relatively unknown Wii game called Pucca’s Kisses Game, which you can see her playing below using the very tools she helped develop.
In the comments, fans have been reacting to the news.
You can reach the author of this post at patrick.klepek@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @patrickklepek.