Anika Begay
ROMhacking.net, a longtime mainstay of the online classic gaming world, mostly turned off the lights on Saturday. Nightcrawler, who created and runs ROMhacking, announced that the site, which hosted community-made mods for classic games, has stopped accepting submissions and will only post news going forward.
Nightcrawler said that the site’s collection can be found on The Internet Archive (where, incredibly, all 20 years of hacks and other files are mostly compressed into a single 11.7GB zip file). He added that the forum will remain active and downloadable content will remain available for now; otherwise, the site is read-only.
Nightcrawler attributed the site’s shutdown to “24/7 usage, endless queues, and an endless inbox,” as well as “legal burdens.” He also accused members of a group that had offered to take over the site of doxxing him and plotting to have him removed from the site. A member of the group disputed his accusations in a series of posts on X.
