On August 1st, Nightcrawler left a bombshell of an announcement on romhacking.net, moving the site to news only and releasing its database to the Internet Archive in the wake of financial and legal hardship. For the typical retro gamer who enjoys rom hacks, whether just a simple sprite replacement or something more elaborate, the news was a big shock, in part because nobody really thinks very much about how the backend of these sites work, and at twenty years of age, romhacking.net is an institution that seems to have survived forever. But in the weeks since the announcement, what exactly happened and why remains extremely unclear. As of this moment, romhacking.net still exists, and you can still download files from it.
The main issue appears to revolve around file hosting. Nightcrawler claimed in the original message that takedown notices and legal burdens were a main motivation behind trying to wind down site operations since late last year and had been trying and failing to find a successor. According to Gideon Zhi of Aeon Translations fame, behind the scenes in December of 2023 Nightcrawler was prepared to shut romhacking.net down entirely with no notice. His thread, which can be seen here, delves a great deal into technical file hosting issues. The short explanation is, the way romhacking.net had been storing data was not especially efficient compared to S3 hosting and was likely the main reason why Nightcrawler was feeling monetary pressure, in addition to all the burnout that could reasonably be expected running a site of romhacking.net’s size and influence.
Gideon Zhi’s interpretation of Nightcrawler’s attitude is a fairly negative one and paints a picture of staff at large being frustrated with Nightcrawler’s escalation of technical problems into highly personal ones. This is the sort of overly online drama that anyone who’s been overly online can relate to. OId School Gamer Magazine reached out to Nightcrawler for comment but has not received any reply ahead of the planned August 21st publication of this article. Yesterday, on August 20th, a donor stopped paying for S3 file storage for the site. This stopgap measure has been replaced by Nightcrawler using his own files to continue hosting the website, for how long, no one is quite sure, even if for the moment the site is still functional.
Much of the remaining drama is over how long this status quo will continue. The sheer systemic inertia of romhacking.net as a central location is not to be underestimated and is the whole reason why Nightcrawler claimed to be negotiating for a handover. Xkeeper of The Cutting Room Floor has corroborated Gideon Zhi’s story of their attempting to acquire romhacking.net only to be rebuffed, despite Xkeeper, as the co-owner of The Cutting Room Floor, being one of the few people to meet the hypothetical definitions Nightcrawler laid out as necessary to take control of romhacking.net.
Xkeeper’s own version of the story, readable here on cohost, mainly just notes the general incoherence of Nightcrawler’s claims, such as the site needing to be shut down in part because it’s connected to a web platform he uses for other projects and clients. It’s also worth noting, as Xkeeper does, that the files which alter roms to have new translations and other features are quite small by modern standards. And of course, romhacking,net has never hosted roms to avoid problerms with legal copyright reasons, although even fully sized roms still wouldn’t be much bigger than the Cloudflare authentication romhacking.net currently requires to access nearly any page on the site.
In one sense, this functions as a silver lining. Whatever personal or technical issues Nightcrawler may be experiencing with romhacking.net, ultimately, the functionality of the site probably isn’t that difficult to recreate, and in the wake of the drama, multiple groups across rom hacking communities are working on possible alternatives. Nightcrawler himself continues to claim to be open to the continuation of the site’s legacy in whatever form. While the whole experience has been a huge shock to these communities over the last few weeks, over the long haul, passion for these projects will likely overcome whatever immediate hosting issues may or may not exist.
In any case, romhacking.net is now read-only, despite a casual glance at the website’s front page showing updates for a website that still fulfills most of the functions it’s famous for. With no new forum registrations allowed (staff and Xkeeper among others were banned from the forums following disputes with Nightcrawler) and news submissions requiring a login, even preexisting users are very limited in what they can do- they can’t even update their own patch files already on the website. This will all work to greatly limit the extent to which romhacking.net can function as a community hub for new rom hacks and translations.
For whatever it’s worth, Old School Gamer Magazine is always interested in stories about new romhacks for old games. My e-mails are open.
William Schwartz is a media writer who specializes in South Korean media, but also writes about a wide variety of popular culture subjects- including retro video games.
