Today ROM-hacking has been all prettied up and gentrified. Now it is supposedly “respectable”. We have hacks like Dragoon X Omega which is a complete conversion. You’d think somebody was trying to make an original game. ROM-hacking is an ass-backwards way to make original games. Think about it, why the fuck would you want to be limited by the ROM you are hacking when you could just get yourself a programming language and make an actual original game with no limits beyond your own imagination? Modern ROM-hackers also like to make hacks which are simply slight level variations on the underlying game. To this I say: “damn, I already played this game before, was it that damn good that I want to do it over again but with impossible levels this time?”. It’s a clinical fact that 96% of our current crop of ROM-hackers have lost touch with their heritage. It’s also a fact that these same hackers have no sense of humor. I cant do shit about their lack of humor, but I can shine a light on our true heritage…..

Pre-1997:

A rare surviving analog ROM-hack.

The emulation scene was just starting up. NES ROMs were beginning to be found on the internet, and some very talented programmers were writing emulators. It was a shitty time to be in the ROM-hacking scene because there were no ROM-hacks. We had to paint genitalia on the TV screen, play a NES game, then have a character in the game stand under it to appear as if it belonged to them. These “analog” ROM-hacks never caught on or spawned a “scene”. In-fact all people responsible for them are now in various prisons, homes for the criminally insane, half-way houses, rehab programs, or cemeteries.

1997: 

This is where it all started people. The dawn of the ROM-hacking scene.

 The coolest thing about 1997.

Bloodlust Software released the NESticle emulator. This baby really set the tenor for the ROM-hacking scene. This was an emulator which featured a severed bloody scrotum as its mascot. By today’s standards it was an average emulator, but for one feature which no other NES emulator has yet matched… you could use it to hack game tiles. It had a tile-viewer built into it, in which you could view all the tiles currently being stored in the VRAM memory as you played a game. Additionally, you could actually go into the tile viewer and use it as if it were a paint program to change the tiles which were in memory to whatever you desired, then save them back to the ROM. It was very easy to do and literally anyone with a small amount of free time could now edit tiles in NES ROMs.

Get a job ya damn hippy!

ROM hacks started springing up willy-nilly at various places. These ROM-hacks were very simple, with no text editing, or if the text was edited, it was edited using NESticle, meaning that the actual fonts were re-arranged. This method of text hacking would lead to one phrase saying what you meant it to say, but all other text in the game being garbled jibberish. Few hackers of this era knew how to change text using a hex editor. ROM-hackers of this era were almost always anonymous one-timers. For whatever reason almost every single ROM hack in this era was of the original Super Mario Brothers. Most were very simple, maybe Mario had no moustache in one hack, and in another, called Nakio, he was nude. People quickly realized that putting Mario in different clothes or removing his moustache did not make for an entertaining hack. Only a gumby would be entertained by that for even a moment. But people did get a chuckle out of hacks like Super Bud Brothers. This was the 1st hack to introduce illegal drug use into a NES game. But it would be 2 other hacks of this era which would become legendary and solidify that the true purpose of ROM-hacking is to make horribly inappropriate things happen in a classic game, in an effort to corrupt and ruin our collective child-hood memories.

They did'nt so much lynch as leap upon.

The 1st was Super KKK Bros. by AC2K. AC2K (or Astro-Creep 2000), was one of earliest hackers on the scene to actually have a consistent name. Apparently he was also into white power and the band White Zombie. This hack was either very offensive or very funny depending on whether or not you are a bigot. What it really had though, was shock value. This was the start of one of ROM-hacking’s most important genres, the “offend the hell out of them” hack. Despite it’s disturbing racism, it’s spirit lives on. Unfortunately for AC2K, racism as a theme in ROM-hacking never really caught on much, possibly owing to the fact that most racist skinheads cant fathom how to use an emulator. Sure, there are occasional nods towards Super KKK Brothers in the form of a swastika, but not really any other in which racism itself is the whole core of the game.

Gays secretly hate dicks, they really want to destroy them.

The 2nd was Megacrap. Megacrap was created by a man going by the name Bryan, who made it for the company Crapcom (presumably a subsidiary of Capcom). It is arguably the iconic ROM-hack. It’s the 1st one to really get it right. This hack had an actual storyline to it, even a hacked intro. Plus, it was not a hack of Super Mario Brothers. Few hacks in 1997 were more than a few tiles changed in Super Mario Brothers. For it’s time this was a very thorough hack-job. Sure, the graphics which were altered look awful, but that intro is pure genius. The comedic timing is brilliant. The bizarre and vague sexual threat which you must face in the hack was the beginning of the most important genre in ROM-hacking, the “Everything Is Sexual” hack. Inspired by the work of Freud, this type of hack sees the world in terms of phallic symbols and vaginal symbols. Mostly Phallic symbols though because its very hard to represent a vagina in 8-bits. In retrospect Megacrap is the most influential hack of 1997, and possibly of all-time. It is the White Album of ROM-hacking. Over the years it became one of the most well known ROM-hacks, aided by some high profile advocates. There once was a very popular emulation site known as Overclocked.org. We all used to visit this site regularly for the emulation inspired comic strip. The creators of this site loved Megacrap so much that they constantly sang it’s praises and even hosted a shrine to Megacrap on their site, on which it was dubbed the “greatest hack of all time”. This brought a greater attention to the art of ROM-hacking and added a lot of momentum not only to Megacrap, but to ROM-hacking in general. Megacrap has a sequel Megafag, but there is a lot of doubt as to whether or not it is also the work of Bryan.

1998:

That goomba sure is happy to see Mario bloody.

In 1998, the “scene” began to become more organized. A website cropped up calling itself the “One-Stop ROM-Hack Shop”. It was basically the only website dedicated solely to collecting together all the various ROM-hacks at the time. The famous emulation website, Zophar’s Domain, also hosted ROM-hacks, though not nearly as many. Hackers finally branched out some to, and although most of the hacks were still simple hacks of Super Mario Brothers, a substantial number of hackers turned on other NES games. At this time the “scene” was not full of holier-than-thou types and crybabies. People just thought it was cool to see about any type of ROM hack get released, even simple shit like Wheel-Chair Mario or Bloody Dagger Brothers was amusing to people for a moment or two.

Also during this time a hacker known as Necrosaro released a tool called Thingy, which made hex-editing of ROMs to change the text easier. Not easy exactly, because it was a lot more complicated and had far fewer features than the tools we use today. But still it made text editing realistic for far more ROM-hackers than could previously do it. Necrosaro was actually part of the distantly related translation “scene” though, I believe, and is probably horrified at the evils his creation was used to create.

It should be law for females to play naked.

Worm, Penis, what's the difference?

Nothing like that sperm meets egg moment.

Robotic clouds?

Around this time such hacks as Lesbian Tennis, Dick Dug, and Super Sperm Brothers got released. Also Grimlick released Autobot Brothers. This was the 1st hack for the hacker who would go on to be the most prolific hacker to date. It was also the beginning of the “poorly insert popular characters into games they don’t belong in” genre of ROM-hacking. Grimlick has become the undisputed king of this genre.

 They resemble coat racks.

We also saw the beginning of the lame “dumb down the graphics” genre of ROM-hacking with the release of Stick River City Ransom.

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