I didn’t intend to be memorializing two entities in the video game fandom and media space this weekend, but this has been a hell of a week, as Romhacking.net has also gone into archive-only mode.

I will say upfront, there is apparently some significant drama behind the scenes that lead up to Romhacking’s closure. I’m not going to editorialise about what happened or go in depth as to why, but I will say this. Romhacking.net appears to be a site that was very dependant on a single person to continue operation – which is one of the reasons why this drama happened and ultimately why it went archive-only. I will say this – the more significant your project is, the more risk there becomes if the project becomes untenable if you get significantly ill or injured, have to take time off because of the death of a family member, or otherwise become incapicated or worse.

In any case, as far as my experiences on the site go, while I was not an active part of the community on the site, I did start actively using the site around the time I got my Retron 5, and have been continuing to actively monitor the site since then, particularly once I got my Polymega. The site served as an excellent one-stop-shop for getting translation patches for games and rom hacks that could do things like add quality-of-life improvements to titles (for example – fixing some spell name information in Might & Magic for the NES).

Over time, there were more than a few translation patches that I ended up finding on other sites, and not on Romhacking, so I found myself having to do additional searches after going there first – but I did always go there first.

Fortunately, should the site go down, the Romhacking Archive is up on Archive.org, so you can just grab the whole thing there.