Founder takes down the Nexus Mods of romhacking after 20 years because 'lines were crossed' by 'a most dishonest and hate filled group,' but others tell a different story

After nearly two decades in the biz, romhacking community lynchpin Romhacking.net is switching out the lights, putting up the chairs, and shutting itself off from new submissions. Why? Because, says the site founder known as Nightcrawler, it's «achieved almost everything it set out to do, and far exceeded it.» But according to other figures attached to the site, it might be a bit more complicated.

Let's start at the start. Romhacking, if you're not familiar, is the process of taking a scalpel to the inner workings of videogame roms—basically digital copies of videogame cartridges—to change the game in some way. It's basically a kind of modding, but done on console roms people are plugging into emulators with tools that are generally a tad less official than the modding toolkits you'll get from the likes of Bethesda for PC games. 

Creators make them to achieve all sorts of stuff, from fan translations of things that never made it out of Japan to full-on new games. For nearly 20 years, Romhacking.net has been a kind of Nexus Mods-esque host for them, assembling «the largest force of ROM hackers on the planet,» per Nightcrawler.

But nothing gold can stay, and Romhacking.net is now retiring, accepting no new hacks or updates to existing ones. In other words, it's shifting to read-only mode rather than going away entirely, at least for now. You'll be able to grab what's already on there «as long as DarkSol, FCAndChill Calico allow,» says Nightcrawler, the names referring to prominent users, and the site's archive has been uploaded to the Internet Archive for the day when it truly goes dark. «It may be a good time to start an open source initiative for a new site,» Nightcrawler recommends.

It all sounds like a site admin who has grown weary of shouldering a heavy burden, but elsewhere in the post Nightcrawler describes a situation that sounds far more sinister. «I was finally looking to wind things down at the end of last year,» says the admin, at which point «an internal