You can still be sued. At that point, you either: a) defend yourself as normal, while attempting to maintain anonymity (difficult & doesn't solve anything) b) let the case go to default judgement (for likely an enormous amount of money) at which point Nintendo has every reason to try to track you down in real life, and can use the courts to help them do so. Hope you were really, really thorough about your anonymity.

How do you sue someone that is anonymous?

File a lawsuit against a John/Jane Doe defendant(s) and describe who the defendants are, e.g., the people who code and maintain the emulator. Maybe a little harder than if you had the names but not by a lot.

I should say: the real difficulty is service, but if there's any way to get in contact with you, there's at least a chance it will be accepted as good service. There was famously a recent case where a defendant known only by a Bitcoin address was served by sending a transaction with an attached message to that address.

OpSec is hard. The Silk Road guy was anonymous, up until he wasn't.

It can be a resume piece. Having been in these communities (server emulation instead of console) you find some insanely bright developers in them. A lot of them don't have a formal education background, but are willing to build out well thought out pieces of software. You just have to do the research on them if they tell you this is who they are, a lot of the times you can find out plenty about how they code and design things out in the open. I'd probably almost always hire such a dev if their code seemed good, and I knew they cared about the quality of their code. Having been involved in those communities though I do know there are awful devs who don't care about what anyone says "my code aint broken" types who never give credit when you help them either (reputation / respect matters more when you're coding for free in some of these communities).

I'll double down on personality that parent comment pointed out. If you see someone submit a project they worked on instead of formal education then you need to see what their exact contribution is and how they interact with other devs. Look at past github comments, issues, etc. Lurk in their chat server or pull logs. Expect to see a more casual attitude than what will show up at work, but pay attention to how contributions are handled, how credit is handled, and how disagreements are handled. It's not a universal problem, but I've seen some of the worst developer drama around volunteer open source video game projects.

Not making sense.

These anon devs can still have socials.

Their resume is public, and you can reach them without revealing their identity.

Do they expect a company to believe them when they say "Yes, that anonymous social profile is actually me, John Emu maker. Really." Then if they proove it, by logging in and posting a known sentinel for example, do they expect everyone on that interview loop to keep their secret?

Companies generally don't take anonymous credentials.

You're arguing with the parent, not me.

"How does someone break the circularity of building a resume and staying anonymous for legal employment?"

Even if the anonymous developer submitted the resume, they are giving the employer the power to dox them. There is a lot of trust there.

This is a little too risky since it could wind up with someone revealing their identity inadvertently or otherwise. If you truly want to be anonymous you should not be leaving so many breadcrumbs. All it takes is for a former employer to have a security breach and someone to point out that they found your real identity.

You said "resume piece."

Now, you say any posting can reveal their identity and is too risky.

These are mutually exclusive.

If you're trying to be anonymous yes, if you're not, then it doesn't matter.

Sometimes the reverse engineering community leans somewhere between gray and blackhat. You may not want to expose your actual identity.

We're talking about building and releasing anonymously.

Your responses are talking past this.

Because making an emulator takes a lot of work. And emulator devs want some compensation for this work - be it money (in form of donations) or a status that could help them gather followers or even land a job.

If you want Patreonbux for your work it has to be tied to a real person (or a real legal entity which is tied to real people)