For 20 years ROMHacking.net was a community where people shared and worked on hacks and remixes of old games. Now, citing burnout and trouble behind the scenes, the site’s founder has announced it’s going dark.
All is not lost, however, as the plan is to archive everything on the site at the Internet Archive. ROMHacking.net will no longer accept new roms but all of the old work will be preserved.
“It’s been a good near 20 year run, but for various reasons it’s time to wind things down. The site achieved almost everything it set out to do, and far exceeded it,” Nightcrawler, the site’s founder, said in a post on the site. “We made major progress legitimizing and pulling ROM hacking from underground dark web type material to something much more accepted by the mainstream. We paved a much easier path for all of those that will come after us.”
A rom is a digital copy of a video game cartridge. Rom hacking is the process of digging into the code for that game and turning it into something else. There’s a mashup of Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past with Super Metroid, unofficial sequels for games like Advance Wars, and countless versions of Super Mario World with overhauled levels.
ROMHacking was a place where people could share and collaborate on these hacks. In his post, Nightcrawler painted a picture of a founder burned out and tired of change. “I miss the times when I was able to interact with a smaller group of supportive people to collaborate with rather than the entire world,” he said. “The site became so busy with 24/7 use, endless queues, and an endless inbox. It’s a very different world than it was in 2005. Copyright pressures increased dramatically with takedowns and legal burden.”
Other people in the rom hacking community are telling a different story. On X, community member Gideon Zhi said he sympathized with Nightcrawler’s burnout. “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 said.
By now you’ve probably seen that https://t.co/TiLKoimaVG is effectively dead. In the end, it’s probably for the best; the site was built in the mid aughts and its backend hadn’t been re-engineered… ever. Consequently it was costing its administrator hundreds of dollars/month.
— Gideon Zhi (@GideonZhi) August 2, 2024
According to Zhi’s thread, Nightcrawler has been toying with the idea of shutting down the site since 2023 and there were no initial plans to archive the work. After that came months of infighting about who would take over and how it would be done.
Nightcrawler commented on some of this in his own post, but was light on details. “We had a rocky phase 1, moving the downloads into their possession,” Nightcrawler said. “When I went to startup phase 2, I discovered a most dishonest and hate filled group. I learned that I had been dehumanized for a very long time. My personal details had been given out. Secret deceitful plots had been made to cut me out, and drop a bomb like I am a target to destroy. My family has seen this and after discussion, we are immediately ceasing all related site operations. We are cutting ties to Discord and Twitter social media outlets, and will have no further contact with these individuals.”
Zhi shared some of the details of the infighting in their thread on X and pushed back on the claim that Nightcrawler was doxed. “Staff grew increasingly frustrated. Days would pass without response from NC,” Zhi said. “He refused to join the Discord to talk about solutions in real-time. Did we vent in private? Sure. Did we dox or threaten? Fucking hell, no! And frankly I’m LIVID at even the suggestion that we did.”
At the end of his post, Nightcrawler disavowed the site’s X and Discord accounts then shared a link to the site’s backups on the Internet Archive.
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