A significant milestone was achieved in late April 2018, when Yuzu booted its first Switch exclusive, "1-2-Switch". Just three months later, the team reached another major landmark: Yuzu successfully ran its first 3D-rendered game, "Minecraft: Story Mode". These early releases were experimental, often riddled with graphical glitches and unstable performance, but they represented the first concrete steps in a long journey. The developers published detailed progress reports that chronicled the immense effort required to research the Switch's architecture and gradually bring Yuzu up to speed.
As one journalist observed in mid-2025, “the emulator grave Nintendo tried to dig didn’t stay filled for long”—Switch emulation on Android, in particular, continued to evolve in surprising ways, with NCE technology enabling genuinely playable experiences on flagship devices.
Shockingly, just one week after the lawsuit was filed, Tropic Haze announced a settlement. Rather than engage in a costly legal battle, the developers agreed to Nintendo's strict terms. The settlement required them to:
For years, the holy grail of emulation was a simple, elusive concept: playing a console’s games on PC while the console was still relevant . For the Nintendo Switch, Yuzu didn’t just achieve this; it turned the impossible into a user-friendly reality. yuzu releases
Early 2018 saw the first successful attempts to boot very simple homebrew applications, laying the groundwork for future graphical emulation. 2. The Golden Era: 2020–2023
But the "Golden Age" of Yuzu is over. Future releases will be community-driven, lacking the centralized, highly organized funding and development structure that made Yuzu so formidable.
In the wake of the shutdown, the open-source nature of Yuzu led to its code being resurrected by other groups. The most notable early fork was , an intentionally named project that was quickly removed from GitLab following a DMCA request. Suyu ultimately ceased development in February 2025. A significant milestone was achieved in late April
The team agreed to cease all operations permanently.
On May 30, 2023, Yuzu officially arrived on Android—a massive milestone that brought the emulator to mobile devices for the first time. The Android version launched as an Early Access release, divided into a free version and a paid Early Access version with additional features and faster updates.
The release cycle ended abruptly when Nintendo of America sued Tropic Haze LLC (the entity behind yuzu) in February 2024. Nintendo alleged that yuzu was "primarily designed" to bypass technological protection measures (TPMs) and facilitated piracy on a massive scale, specifically citing over one million illegal downloads of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom . As part of the settlement, the developers agreed to: in damages to Nintendo. Rather than engage in a costly legal battle,
Available to users who backed the project via Patreon, these builds featured experimental optimizations, cutting-edge graphics fixes, and early support for newly launched games. The final Early Access build was EA 4176 , dropped just days before the project’s sudden shutdown. Key Milestones in the Yuzu Release Timeline
The internet, being what it is, preserved the source code. You can still find the final Early Access version (Build 4176) archived across the web. But the official website, the Discord server, and the GitHub are silent.
Various community members have hosted "yuzu-mirror" repositories to preserve the final source code and builds. Successor Projects: Since Yuzu's source code was open, new projects like have emerged as forks of the final Yuzu release. Quick Setup Guide for Legacy Releases
: On March 4, 2024, Tropic Haze settled with Nintendo for $2.4 million in damages [11, 20].