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.
