ROMHacking.net recently announced its shutdown, but it sounds like something messy happened behind the scenes.
The ROMHacking.net website itself made the announcement on its news section. The site’s administrator, who uses the handle Nightcrawler, revealed that it would become mostly a read-only site, and download links will stay up for as long as the presumed hosts will allow.
But Nightcrawler also shared some troubling details on this closure. He said that when he announced plans to close the site last year, an internal group came to him with offers to continue the site. He questioned their intentions, but decided to give it a try.
Nightcrawler then claimed that working with this group had been difficult, with trouble just handing off the downloads to them. He then claims that he had been doxxed and threatened, and that’s why the site is closing down before this transition had properly ended.
But we found a different account of what has been going on behind the scenes. Gideon Zhi shared a thread on Twitter with details that Nightcrawler didn’t share, and it paints a completely different picture. For purposes of brevity, we’ll summarize their points below.
Zhi denies that Nightcrawler was doxed or threatened, and expressed what would be understandable frustration that he was even telling these stories. They explain that Nightcrawler was difficult to work with in passing the site over to them, even keeping in mind that they were volunteering this work as like-minded fans of old video games and hacks.
The final straw was apparently Nightcrawler not helping them move files around to a cheaper filehost, after they were already paying for some of the costs of this transition.
Now, of course, this all seemed to have played out behind the scenes, and it’s hard to tell what really happened since most of us wouldn’t have been there. But all of this just makes this news even more frustrating to learn about.
If we are only talking about hacks and mods of old video games, there are certainly many other places where you could look for them. But this seems like a completely avoidable closure, to one of the oldest and most well-known sources for them.
It’s also possible that some of these files will be completely lost as a result of this dispute, because the developers who made those hacks could have long left their work behind. We won’t be taking sides on a situation we truly don’t know about, but we do hope that these disputes somehow get resolved so that the website can be saved. We want to believe that it’s still possible.
