A pivotal online hub for ROM hacks goes news-only after two decades
Image: Cath Virginia / The VergeROMhacking.net, a longtime stalwart of the online classic gaming world mostly turned the lights off on Saturday. Nightcrawler, who created and runs ROMhacking, announced that the site, which has hosted community-made alterations for classic...
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ROMhacking.net, a longtime stalwart of the online classic gaming world mostly turned the lights off on Saturday. Nightcrawler, who created and runs ROMhacking, announced that the site, which has hosted community-made alterations for classic games, has stopped taking submissions and will only post news going forward.
ROM hacks like those the site hosted can be as minor as replacing the original Mario sprite with his Super Mario Bros. 3 incarnation, or as thorough as Mario Builder 64, essentially a game in its own right that lets you create your own levels for Super Mario 64, a la Super Mario Maker — a Nintendo series that arguably owes a lot to the ROM hacker community.
Hobbyist contributors to ROMhacking regularly submitted tweaks for game ROM files that included bug fixes, additions, and even translations of games that were never released in certain languages, like English or Spanish. You can also find things like the reverse-engineered source code for the original NES Metroid game. Writing about the shutdown yesterday, Polygon pointed to its past stories about translations of Sailor Moon and Samurai Showdown games. ArsTechnica called out a mod that lets the SNES Star Fox run at 60 frames per second.
Nightcrawler said the site’s collection can be found on The Internet Archive (where, incredibly, all 20 years’ worth of hacks and other files are mostly concentrated in a single 11.7GB zip file.) He added that the forum will stay up and downloadables will remain available for now; otherwise, the site is in read-only mode.
Nightcrawler blamed the wind-down of the site on “24/7 use, endless queues, and an endless inbox,” as well as “legal burdens.” He also accused members of a group who’d offered to take over administering the site of doxxing him and of plotting to remove him from the site. One member of the group disputed his accusations in a series of posts on X.
