After more than twenty years of activity, ROMhacking.net is closing. The founder and manager of the site, Nightcrawler, announced it, and in a long post he clearly talks about the situation that led to the closure, without too many turns of phrase.
Over the years, ROMhacking has become a very complex site to manage, having gone from having a community of a few dozen people to millions of readers around the world. This has obviously also led to many additional expenses for site maintenance and server rental, in addition to continuous threats and legal retaliation from various companies that own the copyright of the various patched games.
Nightcrawler also tried to have some forum members run the site, but this decision led to many more problems and the experiment was discontinued. As a result, ROMhacking.net will continue to exist as a read-only site and all of its content will be moved to the Internet Archive, however, no new rom hacks will be published.
The site has become famous for hosting the English translations of many Japanese games such as Sailor Moon Another Soty or Samurai Shodown RPG, but not only because for example in 2020 a patch was released to fix a graphical bug in Super Mario 64 that Nintendo has never fixed since 1996. From today all this will be just a memory.
