From the ashes of ROMhacking comes a new site determined to replace it, well sort of, but the scene is still packed with drama

Ever since ROMHacking – the internet collection of hacks and translations for many of the best games of yesteryear closed its doors to new submissions, mainly due to changing times, but also because of a little behind-the-scenes drama, followers of such things have bemoaned the lack of a decent alternative.

Of course, ROMhacking released an 11GB torrent containing absolutely everything on the site apart from user details, meaning it is technically possible for anybody to pick up the baton and begin ROMhacking 2.0.

That’s not quite what has happened here, but the recently rebranded ROMHack Plaza is shaping up to take on at least some of the mission, albeit again with more drama than is probably needed. Formerly known as ROMHacks.org the move to change names is in part to take advantage of the shifting sands in the scene but also to distance itself from the previous owner, “Spike” who was largely outed, possibly incorrectly in ROMhacking’s departing shots as one of the reasons it was altering course to a news only site. Are you keeping up?

Now, seemingly fed up with the day-to-day trolling, Spike has decided to leave ROMHack.org and this has led to the change to ROMHack Plaza (even I am struggling here). So we have a new player and one that seemingly just wants to get on with supplying ROM hacks for popular old games, which doesn’t seem unreasonable.

Previous owner Spike in the meantime has been getting support from the site’s users, with one saying, “I really don’t understand the need for any of this. Spike shouldn’t have had to leave, he did absolutely nothing wrong. Personally speaking.

“ I fully 100% stand by him and really hope he returns and notices that he has a lot of support from people who truly understand the situation, and have looked past the lies of certain other bad websites and the disreputable children that make false accusations and run away, destroying many people’s effort selfishly.

“And now this site is changing its name for no reason? This is all very unfair.”

So maybe all the fuss is yet to totally die down. How much of ROMhacking’s 11GB file dump will end up being added to ROMHack Plaza is unclear but there is so much retro treasure in there it would be foolish not to at least look at incorporating some of it.

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