Nintendo/Toruzz
If something was wrong with an old game, or if you wanted to make another version and you wanted people to help you fix it, you usually did that on RomHacking.net. After this week, you're going to have to go somewhere else.
For nearly 20 years, the site has been home to a number of notable remakes, translations, adaptations, and experiments. Star Fox runs at 60 fps, Super Mario Land 2 in color, a solution for Super Mario 64's bad smoke, even a Pac-Man “demake” that Namco refurbished and resold – and that's not counting the stuff that was pulled due to corporate shutdowns. It's a remarkable collection, spanning both very obscure and mainstream games, and worth preserving.
It will be preserved, but it seems that the RomHacking site will not continue. The site's founder posted a closing statement on the site on Thursday night, praising the community, bashing certain members, and looking forward to what would happen with “the next generation.”
To summarize founder Nightcrawler’s statement: the site had come a long way, he missed the early days of small groups, there were more options now, and then, last year, he tried to hand over control to a small internal group. That’s when, Nightcrawler writes, he “discovered an extremely dishonest and hateful group,” a group that targeted him in order to remove him from the site and intimidate him.
The site's database, minus accounts and profiles, has been transferred to the Internet Archive. RomHacking will have news posts and forums, but everything else is read-only, and official Twitter and Discord “affiliations” have been terminated.
“I thank all the staff and community members who kept the wheels turning and the lights on over the years. I am proud of our many accomplishments here together. I will continue to remember the good times, laugh at the bad times and know that she was right about the time, but time has a way of moving on,” Nightcrawler wrote.
Not the whole story
Gideon Zhi, owner of Time Capsule Games and a RomHacking member for over 20 years, took issue with Nightcrawler's monologue coda. In a thread on X (formerly Twitter), Zhi acknowledged the site's technical debt, financial costs, and admin burnout. “But he has existed as a single point of failure for the site, exercising an iron fist over community-generated content and categorically refusing virtually all offers of assistance over the past decade,” Zhi wrote.
Zhi describes a near-abandonment of the site last year, followed by attempts by interested members gathered on the site’s Discord chat server to migrate the site’s backend to modern storage and file serving like Amazon Web Services S3, and Nightcrawler’s last-minute refusal to implement the changes. He also denied that volunteers in the attempted migration threatened or doxxed Nightcrawler.
An admin on the now “unofficial” Discord for the site confirmed a “rocky” relationship between the founder and the future admins, as reported by PC Gamer. The Discord admin also denied any threats or harassment toward Nightcrawler.
While ROM hacking, translations, demakes, and other game-modifying work will certainly continue elsewhere, the gaming world has lost a sort of central repository for the most important fixes, a repository with a community full of highly skilled hackers.
