By Nelson Schneider - 10/06/24 at 02:24 PM CT
Gaming news is slow and dismal this Fall, so what better time to take a look back at the happenings we may have missed over the Summer?
It turns out that back in August, the long-running home for mods of classic Golden Age videogames – typically referred to as “rom-hacks,” as they involve editing the read-only memory dumped from a vintage cartridge (or, more rarely, disc) – romhacking.net, was permanently shut-down by its owner.
We’ve had plenty of grim news lately about Nintendo suing or sending Cease and Desist letters to all sorts of rom distribution sites and emulator developers in their perpetual game of Whack-a-Mole, but this time around, the decision to shut-down a rom-related site had nothing to do with them, but rather revolved entirely around personality conflicts between the site’s movers and shakers.
Romhacking.net had been around for 20 years, as an organized archive for rom-hacks and fanslations of all manner of 8-bit and 16-bit games, even expanding into ‘newer’ (but still old) gaming platforms as time went on. However, romhacking.net had its origins in the Web 1.0 era of forums, BBSes, and bespoke backends for each and every discreet site. That origin, and technical stagnation, seem to be the biggest causes behind the site’s downfall, as the owner simply wouldn’t, couldn’t, and didn’t update it to take advantage of modernized Internet infrastructure and standardized APIs, while simultaneously refusing to step aside and allow the fan community to take up the mantle of leadership and technical stewardship, even though they were quite ready and willing to do so.
While romhacking.net will no longer host hacks or mods, the site’s archaic community features will remain in perpetuity, while offloading the site’s exhaustive collection of mods to The Internet Archive (which is, quite honestly, the best and most reliable place to get anything emulation-related).
It’s funny how we have this idea that once something is on the Internet, it lasts forever. Yet when a niche interest site that serves as the axle about which an entire community revolves suddenly shuts its doors, an enormous amount of “forever” stuff suddenly disappears forever.
