ROM hacking site shutting down after almost 20 years

If there was something wrong with an old game, or you wanted to make a different version of it, and you wanted people to help you fix that, you typically did that on RomHacking.net. After this week, you’ll have to go elsewhere.

For nearly 20 years, the site has been home to some remarkable remakes, translations, fix-ups, and experiments. Star Fox running at 60 fps, Super Mario Land 2 in color, a fix for Super Mario 64‘s bad smoke, even a Pac-Man “demake” that Namco spiffed up and resold—and that’s not even counting the stuff that was pulled down by corporate cease-and-desist actions. It’s a remarkable collection, one that encompasses both very obscure and mainstream games and well worth preserving.

Preserved it will be, but it seems that the RomHacking site will not go on further. The site’s founder posted a sign-off statement to the site Thursday night, one that in turn praised the community, decried certain members of it, and looked forward to what will happen with “the next generation.”

To condense the statement by founder Nightcrawler: the site had come a long way, he missed the early small-group days, there are more options now, and then, last year, he attempted to hand control over to a small internal group. That is when, Nightcrawler writes, he “discovered a most dishonest and hate filled group,” one that targeted him for cutting out of the site and harassment.

The site’s database, minus accounts and profiles, has been handed off to the Internet Archive. RomHacking will have news posts and forums, but everything else is read-only, and the official Twitter and Discord “affiliations” are ended.

“I thank all of the many staff and community members whom kept the wheels turning and the lights on over the years. I am proud of our many accomplishments here together. I will carry forward remembering the good times, laughing about the bad times, and knowing she was right for the time, but time has a way of moving on,” Nightcrawler wrote.

Not the whole story

Gideon Zhi, proprietor of Time Capsule Games and member of RomHacking for more than 20 years, took issue with Nightcrawler’s monologued coda. In a thread on X (formerly Twitter), Zhi acknowledged the site’s technical debt, monetary cost, and the burnout in being its administrator. “But he existed as a single point of failure for the site and exerted iron-fisted control over community-created content, and categorically refused basically all offers of help over the last decade,” Zhi wrote.

Zhi details a near abandonment of the site last year, followed by attempts by interested members, gathered on the site’s Discord chat server, to transition the site’s back-end to modern storage and file serving, such as Amazon Web Services S3, and last-minute refusal by Nightcrawler to enact the changes. He also denied that the volunteers on the attempted transition threatened or doxxed Nightcrawler.

An administrator on the now “unofficial” Discord for the site confirmed a “rocky” relationship between the founder and the would-be administrators, as reported by PC Gamer. The Discord admin also denied threats or harassment toward Nightcrawler.

While ROM hacking, translation, demakes, and other game-altering work will certainly continue elsewhere, the gaming world has lost a kind of central depot for the most notable fixes, one with a community full of very experienced hackers.