Romhacking.net announces shutdown

The website Romhacking.net announced that after 20 years they are shutting down operations.

This is, without exaggeration, probably the worst video gaming news that I’ve read in the last 20 years.

The good news is that they have turned over the content of the website to the Internet Archive, where it will continue to be available for download, hopefully forever.

This development apparently is not driven by copyright or trademark infringement issues resulting in a takedown of content. The site has always been conscientious about not hosting copyrighted content; only patch files were available for download; the patches have to be applied to a ROM file, which itself may introduce legal gray areas, but it’s generally been considered legal to have ROMs that you have ripped yourself, as a backup, from media which you own. Still, the site had to be very careful with how it presented its materials, and with what submissions it accepted for hosting, lest it run afoul of litigious copyright holders.

The maintainer of the website, Nightcrawler, stated in their post that they had tried to find a successor to take on the role of maintaining the site, and were unable to. Apparently there were candidates in talks with Nightcrawler, but things fell through in an apparently nasty way that recalls toxic internet culture. Nightcrawler also mentions that over the past few years operating the site has seen a shift from human operators to bots, and that dealing with bots is a chore.

I’m not clear what the ultimate impact of this will be. But it seems bad. At the very least new romhack projects will have to find a new place to go, and those looking for them will have a harder time finding them. The old content should (hopefully) be safe in good hands at Internet Archive, but the living community of users who made the scene happen is going to be disrupted by this, and that can’t be a good thing.

Romhacking.net was like a digital mecca for video game remixers. The quality of many projects was first rate, as good or even better than many original releases that they derived from. It wasn’t just a site where you could find, seemingly without limit, unauthorized sequels, but also fan translations of games that were never officially released in English, and improvements that provided bug-fixes and “quality of life” improvements to clunky interfaces. All of which were passion projects by and for the fans and gamers who loved the original works and wanted to see them preserved and improved upon and presented in their best possible format. Rom hacking and emulation go hand in hand to preserving video game history, often in spite of the objections of the industry.

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