After twenty years of activity, ROMhacking.net has decided to close down. This is the go-to site for hack writers, modders, and homebrew game creators. The motivationsThey were given directly on the pages of the site by the founder Nightcrawler, who retraced what has been done since the foundation and explained the reasons for his choice.
The reasons for the closure
“It’s been a 20-year ride, but for various reasons it’s time to close. The site has achieved almost all of its goals, and even gone beyond them. We have united the hacking and translation communities from around the world for the first time ever. We have survived and eclipsed the ROM hacking sites that came before us. We have taken ROM hacking from a niche and highly fragmented industry to a global and centralized one. We have created the largest ROM hacking force on the planet,” they explain, before concluding that “We have paved the way for all those who will come after us. Without a doubt, this site changed ROM hacking forever.”
In fact, over the years ROMhacking.net has become a very important reality for the scene, to the point that it led to the decision to close it. It had essentially become unmanageable, considering the very high traffic and continuous user interactions, but they couldn’t find anyone who could continue it. “The pressures related to copyright increased dramatically with takedowns and lawsuits. The site went from mainly serving people who contributed to overzealous people who abused the available resources, which suffocated everyone else.” In short, over time ROMhacking.net became less useful than in the past and the community became more pretentious and difficult to manage.
The attempt to have the site managed by an internal community group It was a disaster, with download theft and various dishonest actions, such as the release of Nightcrawler’s personal data and the creation of a secret plan to cut him off from the site entirely. In short, the founder had become a target to be destroyed. The result was the end of the site.
Fortunately, the entire ROMhacking.net database has been given to the Internet Archive, which will take care of preserving it. In short, as often happens, the community wicked behavior played a key role in a choice that will have repercussions on the entire scene.
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