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[phubans]

Long ago, long before I was making games with Game Maker or doing graphics for DS games, I had a similar hobby; rom hacking. I started a Geocities page to feature my hacks circa 1999 - 2000, and I called it RAD ROMS. I was a teenager in my last year of high-school and I had always aspired to make my own games, so it was only natural for me to start tinkering with some of my favorite NES roms when I found out that I could.

Armed with Nesticle, a tile ripper, and a hex editor, I got to work... Apart from all the failed experiments was one game that I had spent the most time on, a hack of the original Super Mario Bros that I called Mario's Dream World. This hack went beyond mere sprite hacking; I swapped out nearly all of the sprites for their SMB3 counterparts while adding a few of my own, re-drew the font entirely, changed some text, swapped some colors, and with the help of a level editor I was even able to change the first seven stages of the game.



Looking through my composition books that I have been designing out of for the past 10+ years, I saw my notes on the extensive work I did with the hex code... Pages of finding where sprites and colors were stored so I could swap them out and give the game a whole new look. But was the legacy of all this hard work known only to these worn pages? Or was this rom I hacked stored away on some now-defunct floppy disk buried in the bottom of a box on the other side of the country? Or better yet, was it still somewhere on the Internet?

I decided to do a Google search for: "mario's dream world" rom and to my amazement, there it was- Mario's Dream World by Darvon (SMB1 Hack). Darvon, my "elite rom-hacking alias" of a bygone era. There was no mistaking it, this was indeed the rom I had worked on, now appearing only among countless other forgotten hacks on websites written in languages I couldn't understand... But this was it.

BMcC can attest to my excitement, as he was chatting with me during this discovery (it was actually his mention of roms that started this whole thing). And here I was, about to play something that I had made over a decade ago and hadn't seen since. I was nearly trembling. I loaded the rom into my NES emulator and saw the title screen come up:



But my excitement quickly turned to bewilderment and disappointment when I realized that I couldn't start the game... It wasn't accepting any inputs. No... This couldn't be! I had come too close to being 19 again and I wasn't about to give up now. I decided to download and try it with Nesticle, since that was the emulator I mainly used back then. It didn't surprise me that no version of Nesticle was able to run on Vista. So I decided to try another emulator I hadn't tried before, RockNES.

You can imagine how happy I was when I pressed enter and the screen showing my current world and remaining lives appeared. Now, my friends, I know it isn't much but it's very special to me, so I am sharing it with you; one of the first playable games I ever worked on...

Mario's Dream World



Flying fish that turn into turtles when stomped!



A wacky, colorful world made of Mario's dreams!



I think at one point I made the sky pink, but that version may be lost forever...



In some levels you can jump OVER the flag pole and continue even further into the hidden reaches of the level... I put Toad there because when I was young I had a dream that I jumped over the flag pole and on the other side Toad was bowing to me and I was rewarded with 1-UPs

Anyways, thank you for viewing my lengthy thread and I hope you enjoyed it!

[PaleFox]

My god, I remember this hack. That was you? I played it -- I may have beaten it, even! God damn, I need to download this and feel some nostalgia.

[compositeredfox]

Awesome! Thanks for sharing it. I'm always surprised of the things I find I worked on in my teens and have forgot about long ago.

[s0]

That's amazing. 

I should post some of my old text-based games some time. I bet you're all dying to play some early masterpieces by a seminal indie figure such as myself. 

[pgil]

This is an awesome thread 

I can't seem to find anything of mine from 2000, but here's something from 2001:



Third game in the Reality on the Norm series. I was a freshman in high school when I made it. Lots of lame jokes and references nobody will get. Good stuff.

[phubans]

My god, I remember this hack. That was you? I played it -- I may have beaten it, even! God damn, I need to download this and feel some nostalgia.

Really?? Wow, that someone would recognize this is even more surprising! Talk about the icing on the cake!! :D

And yes, it's cool to see old projects that everyone worked on, so please post more! :D

[Melly]

This thread has my approval.

 

[Dustin Smith]

I'll have to give that a shot Phubans, I'm a sucker for Mario ROM hacks. If I knew where they were I'd post pics of some board games I made when I was 7-10 -- imagine Candy Land but with Mario, a boat, two Bowsers, and a DIY comic-book manual. It was made on half of a cardboard box; there was this flap towards one edge of the board. I had it so that if you didn't roll a five or higher whilst in the boat the flap would smash your game piece and send you to the beginning.  I made a rudimentary D&D too, before I knew what D&D was.   

[Cypress]

My god, this looks awesome. How long did it take you to make the hack?

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

my friend kelly used to make romhacks for nes games too, but only some of those survived the tears of time; most are lost. she used to do very weird / adult romhacks, like making samus pregnant in metroid 1 and turning all the enemies into sperm.

[AuthenticKaizen]

nice idea

in many cases you can use the internet archive: wayback machine (web time machine) in order to find lost stuff.
(it is also possible that you can download stuff that isn't available anymore since not only sites are archived  but also files in some cases)
if you have found a file that you would like to download and it doesn't work you might have to check different archive dates of the site...

http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

[phubans]

My god, this looks awesome. How long did it take you to make the hack?

I don't remember... Probably worked on it for a couple months, but it was never finished. Only the first seven stages of the game are edited.

nice idea

in many cases you can use the internet archive: wayback machine (web time machine) in order to find lost stuff.
(it is also possible that you can download stuff that isn't available anymore since not only sites are archived  but also files in some cases)
if you have found a file that you would like to download and it doesn't work you might have to check different archive dates of the site...

http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

Yeah, I was actually able to find my first website on there, but I'm not posting it here because it's way too embarrassing

[Bood_war]

I think that it was around then that I played SMB for first tie period!

I think I'll try it right now in fact.

[sergiocornaga]

Third game in the Reality on the Norm series. I was a freshman in high school when I made it. Lots of lame jokes and references nobody will get. Good stuff.

I remember Reality on the Norm! I had so many grand plans for games for that, my most elaborate being one where a nuclear explosion transformed the entire town into superheroes. Never finished, of course.

Something I'd be keen to find is any of the awful levels I made for a game called Castles of Adventure.

[laserghost]

Around that time I was taking a BASIC programming class in high school. Never made much beyond receipt calculators and quiz programs in the class, but it eventually came to my attention that my TI-83 calc used BASIC. My best 'game' I made was an Itchy & Scratchy random sentence generator. It would say things like "Scratchy  stabbed the eyeballs of  Itchy." or "Itchy  threw boiling tar all over  Ku Klux Clam." etc, etc... The code for this has long since been erased, unfortunately, but I'd love to get back into TI-83 games again at some point, since I still have it.

I had this theme of random generators, because I also took an html class and eventually figured out how to get three images on the same web page to randomly switch out independent of one another. I was proud of the trick I used, because normally the html of that time would make all randomized images on a single page be the same image. I made the Random Sock Monkey Generator, which included heads, torsos, and legs of various wacky sock monkeys. You could make a Pirate-Superman-Wheelchair sock monkey, or a Robot-Princess-Glowing sock monkey. It's possible I might still have the code and images for that saved to cd somewhere...

[lokijki]

I wasn't doing to much in 2000 in terms of game design, being 8 and all, although I'm sure plenty of people started when they were young. (Although I do remember being interested in it back then, even.)

I think around that time I was making board games and maybe even designing levels for "Snake Quest."

[Jacob_]

I wasn't doing to much in 2000 in terms of game design, being 8 and all, although I'm sure plenty of people started when they were young. (Although I do remember being interested in it back then, even.)

I think around that time I was making board games and maybe even designing levels for "Snake Quest."

I didn't even have a computer until 2001, but I started off writing AppleScripts (Mac OS 9) and using Stagecast Creator. Also designed a few web pages, though I didn't put anything online. I didn't get into real code until around age 12, and it was PHP.

[phubans]

I wasn't doing to much in 2000 in terms of game design, being 8 and all, although I'm sure plenty of people started when they were young. (Although I do remember being interested in it back then, even.)

Yep, and since this thread has turned into a general game dev nostalgia thread, I'd like to share my earliest work, which comes from 1988 when I was between the ages of 6 and 7 years old. Although this happened 22 years ago, I can almost remember sitting on the floor at my grandma's old house, drawing on these wacky paper paint palettes with pen and crayon. I drew out a list of items for my very first game idea; Killer Kelps, which was clearly inspired by The Legend of Zelda and Goonies II.

EDIT: The images get cut off in the post, right-click and view to see the full image.


This was the first game-related image I ever created back in 1988, obviously influenced by Zelda. As indicated by some of my backwards lettering, I was probably about 6 years old and hadn't fully mastered spelling yet (I undoubtedly had to ask my grandma how to spell everything on here).


After I had finished that, I was already planning on the sequel; Killer Kelp-2 (sic), which had more of a Super Mario Bros influence.


A list of enemies, inspired by Zelda.


Here were some tips on how to play the game and beat certain enemies, with a (literally) attached image of some new content. Again, a pretty obvious Zelda reference here with the ghost, tombstones and boomerang.


In-game screenshot. Never mind the fact that I didn't color in the rest of the grass or write the 1's to face the right direction; you get the idea.


Later came an updated inventory document that features a few new items.

Throughout the next ten years I would occasionally draw up more ideas for this game whenever I'd be inspired by a new game or dream I had. Most of the influence came from games like Zelda and Crystalis and the drawings and designs maintained the tradition of being drawn in ball point pen and colored with Crayola crayons. Another notable feature of the game was that it offered a large variety of swords (inspired by Crystalis and Willow on the NES), some that weren't even practical; ie: the lightbulb sword, the crab claw sword, etc.

At best, the game is a jumbled amalgamation of various scraps of ideas that I randomly came up without throughout the years; worlds, items, and themes that only loosely tie together. And though it was my dream as a child to someday make this game, it would be somewhat impractical to try and piece it together coherently from a design point of view. Still, some of my better known games from today like Madhouse and Sword of Legends draw a lot of their ideas from the massive resource bank that is Killer Kelps.