Today is a sad day for fans of ROM hacks all over the world. For close to two decades, ROMhacking.net has been a central hub for hackers, modifiers, and creators of homebrew games. In the early hours of the morning for UK gamers (19:32 PST), the creators announced their official closure with a statement on their website, detailing the journey that they have made since starting the website and thanking the community for joining them on every step of the way.
“It’s been a good near 20-year run, but for various reasons, it’s time to wind things down,” the update from Nightcrawler begins, with the team safe in the knowledge that they achieved far more than they ever set out to do. I think we can all agree that this site has helped to bring ROM hacking to the masses, changing the perception about hacking and providing a place where people could experiment with new ideas and provide new entries for titles that have long since fallen into the ether.
While the legality around ROMs changes depending on who you are talking to and on how old the console the games you’re hacking are, this is a site that all of us have perused from time to time to learn more about game creation. “No doubt, this site changed ROM hacking forever,” the message goes on to say, “It will leave behind the legacy of those accomplishments to remember.”
It’s no surprise that the team behind Romhacking.net has felt the pressure recently. The world is definitely a different place when it comes to legal takedowns from the gaming giants, and with hefty fines like the one Yuzu had to pay in damages to Nintendo impossible to ignore, I wouldn’t be surprised if the owners of the site felt a similar retribution. The operation has become an evergrowing entity too, a constantly evolving beast too big for one team to handle. Still, the official message cites foul intentions from other users and an internal group who defiled personal information and carried out deceitful plots.
So what’s next for Romhacking.net? What will happen to all the files on the site? According to Nightcrawler, they wanted to shift the game files in their possession to a public database last year but halted the process when outside support arrived. Now, the process is underway to release the entire site database minus the account information of users to Internet Archive.
The site will remain open for News posts, so we’ll still get to hear about new ROM hacks from the community and talk about them in the dedicated forums. No downloads apart from images will be available from the site, however, and Nightcrawler has confirmed that they will no longer be affiliated with Twitter or Discord.
You can find out more about the closure of Discord in the official post on the ROMhacking.net website.
