Someone posted photos of DieHard GameFan vol. 4 issue 8 (Aug. 1996) on Reddit and in glancing at one page I was surprised to see the writer describe Saturn Sword & Sorcery (aka 3DO Lucienne's Quest) with the line "it's as if the game's running on a poor 3DO emulator."

My first thought was that they wrote this before emulation was very well known. Though we have documentation of game console emulators as early as 1990, the scene didn't really take off until the second half of the '90s when MAME, etc. coalesced. The DOS-based NES emulator NESticle, which became broadly popular (relatively speaking for back then), wasn't released until Apr. 1997.

But ah, Namco Museum Vol. 1 goes back to Nov. 1995. And the first (DOS) version of Williams Arcade's Greatest Hits--I remember some version of this getting a pretty nice critical reception for its seeming authenticity--was possibly Oct. 1995. So those are two products that might've put "emulator" into the mid-1996 gamer-cum-writer's lexicon.

That or the writer, who appears to be Casey "Takuhi" Loe, was just really in the know about this sort of thing by 1996 standards. Loe was (is) a really smart guy so that's quite possible too.

But yeah, it's probably just that the Williams and Namco products had already landed and started informing everyone of the wild possibilities that the strange new (not really) concept of "emulation" held. That started happening a little earlier than I first recalled.

As for "bad 3DO emulators," I'm not sure there exists a great one yet. Even so, we were happily reminded earlier this week that this status quo can change at literally any time.