DIY GAMIN THE ROM-HACKING SCENE

Allow us, if you would be so kind, a bold opening statement: in our belief, the internet could be mankind’s most costly mistake. After all, what has it given us? New ways to argue with our relatives, the self-destructive temptation to read our work emails when we should be getting some rest, and PewDiePie. So why do we put up with it? Simple – it’s the best outlet for collective creativity that we’ve got. We see people make cakes that look like bog rolls, so we go off to make one that resembles a NES cartridge. We get a little rush when people like our crudely edited images of Bernie Sanders asking for something. Remix culture is perhaps the one redeeming feature of the internet, and ROM hacking is a perfect expression of that culture. By taking existing games and editing them, players can create new and sometimes drastically different experiences.

Of course, gamers using arcade, home console and handheld games aren’t really to go poking around in the code – and unlike the players of home computer systems, they aren’t really given the tools to do so. With that in mind, it’s no surprise that the art of ROM hacking has rather murky origins. One of the most common sources of ROM hacks in the early days of videogames was the arcade market, where bootleggers would offer rebranded and sometimes slightly modified versions of popular games, like and Few of those ended up