Radiation's Halloween Hack, also known as "Press the B Button," is an award-winning alteration of the 1995 cult-classic-role-playing-video-game EarthBound, a half "Peanuts," half-acid trip lucid daydream-nightmare created for the Super Nintendo as the surreal, suburban counterpart to archetypical medieval role-playing games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior.
EarthBound dominated my childhold, shaped my preteen years, and played a large role in molding me into the offbeat pseudohippie I am today. It gave me a sense of humor. It helped me learn how to read. Its lessons served as a basis for my sense of justice and courage.
So when I heard about Starmen.Net's Halloween Funfest, a contest to see which EarthBound fans could make the best seasonally-themed creations, I took one glace at the game, once glance at my ROM-Hacking prowess, and set myself off to work.
ROM Hacking, or the alteration of old video games, is a complicated process completely unrelated to computer, website, or otherwise potentially malicious-hacking. It is a complicated process that involves a wide variety of factors but mostly boils down to the possession of two key elements: tolerancy for failure, and the existence of a specific editing program for a certain game.
ROM Hacking, regardless of the format, is a mind-numbing experience most easily comparable to attempting to excavate the ruins of an ancient, long-lost civilization using only a small set of tools. Also, the ruins are made of crumbly graham crackers and the explorer's hands are made of atom bombs.
This is because these games' layouts, programming, and data have already been translated into scrambly, runic, byzantine maps of machine code, and a ROM hacker's only hope for understanding the location of the long-lost treasure (graphics data, music data, etc.) is to either understand the robotic runes completely (meaning: to be entirely insane), to be very dedicated and careful, or to have help from an outside source.
Fortunately, I had more than a map to the labyrinthine construct that is the EarthBound ROM (the amalgamate of its data). I had a full-fledged highly specified EarthBound ROM editor created over many years of an entire community's combined effort, and experience using said program at a very high level since its first iteration, released when I was in 7th grade. Additionally, just two years prior I had created a ROM Hack with a similarly massive scope and succeeded in winning the Winter Funfest, so I had lots of knowledge with the timeframe and the work. The editor knew the insides of the EarthBound ROM well, and I knew the editor well.
So, would it be easy?
No.
PKHack, the premier EarthBound editing software on the internet, had been, yes, created collectively by an entire community - and so, over time the entire editor took on a sort of clunky, patchwork approach to ROM editing. Different parts of the program were written by different authors, and different parts of the program rearranged and redirected data in the EarthBound ROM in different ways, sometimes conflicting with each other. As I had learned with my last project, the more parts of the ROM that are edited in different ways, the higher the eventual inevitability that PKHack will fudge up the ROM, turning the game into a goopy, incoherent mess of borked data and vomited pixel tiles.
ROM Hacking is a challenge. Even when you KNOW how everything works.
Beyond this, the ROM world is a place of limits, caused by the heavy constraints placed on the original game creators by the format they worked with: In this case, the heavily compressed cartridge format. For example, each image in a Super Nintendo game has a limit of 16 colors; this set of colors, or palette, is shared with many other images to save space. Additionally, many images share not only colors, but parts, meaning in the economical world of ROM Hacking, editing the shape of one ice cream cone may change the shape of them all.
Additionally, there is a finite number of monsters, items, map space, text, and almost everything else in the ROM. Your imagination is girded heavily by the confines of a game where, for another example, every enemy can only have four different attacks - six if you count the odd programming trick that combine two enemies into one.
So, ROM Hacking is hard. The games (or ROMs) are not only in a state not meant for them to be edited in, but they have also been hard-coded and designed for specific purposes: The purposes of the people who created the game. Almost everything you edit has to have been feasible in the original game, and chances are if you DO choose to edit something, it's going to be in an esoteric system understood by only the wackiest programmers.
Here's an example for you: EarthBound's text system, a cross bewtween a primitive programming language and the US telegraph system.
- Each line of text is basically English, but heavily punctuated with a STOP [03] codes, PAUSES [01 XX] (where XX is a variable that denotes the length of the pause), NEWLINES [00], and END [02] codes.
- If you forget an [03], text will keep parsing too quickly for the reader to actually... read.
- If you forget a [00], the next sentence will run into the previous line and look very ugly.
- Heaven save you if you forget an [02] code, in which case the text will keep parsing into the next block of text data and the friendly old grandma you're talking to down the street might suffer a schizoid attack and begin spouting dialogue from the final boss - consequentially starting a battle you might be quite unready for.
- And God forbid should you ever want to start a battle on purpose - that involves the [1F 23 XX XX 00] code, whose use involves finding the number of the battle you want (for example, 687), converting it into hexadecimal (2AF), cutting it into two bytes (02 AF), and swapping the order of the two bytes to compensate for the Super Nintendo's little endian processing unit, which reads them BACKWARDS. (So in all that would be [1F 23 AF 02 00]. Don't mess up.)
- Oh, and don't forget to close the text windows before you start the battle, otherwise they'll be floating in the background when you fight! That's [18 04].
- And make sure you don't lose the battle, otherwise the rest of the text block will parse unreadably on the GAME OVER screen as the viewer uncomfortably witnesses their demise to the chirpy sound of invisibly scrolling text. To make sure THAT works right involves a set of codes so lengthy and blasphemous it's better if I leave it at that and hope you understand that this is kind of ridiculous.
And that's just the text system. There's also a map system, a door system, several different types of image systems, a monster system, an item system... just about everything in the game has some way to be altered, each with its own new and interesting way to cause the game to explode and require you to restart all your hard work. It's masochistic. And very, very, fun.
Just as a corollary to all this, this is what Clyde Mandelin "Tomato" had to say about my hack:
"It even has custom music, which is crazy hard to hack in EarthBound..."
And this is coming from the lead hacker and translator for MOTHER 3, EarthBound's sequel and a ridiculous ROM Hacking nightmare.
It's nuts.
So I went into this knowing full well the limitations and the difficulties - the volatility of the incomprehensible map editor, the user-unfriendliness of the music editor, and the downright malevolence of the text system. And I treated it the way a real game maker would: I planned.
I wrote out all the dialogue, wrote the plot, drew the enemies, and figured out EVERYTHING I needed to do beforehand, and THEN I started the process: The endless game errors, the hours of drawing monsters in Microsoft Paint, the making of music in the worst composition software known to man after Cross Country practice, the screams of my parents as I stayed up past eleven o' clock, the time where I went through fourteen different backup ROMs in one day, and the night I didn't sleep (AKA my birthday).
All for this.
Radiation's Halloween Hack (Press the B Button) is an edit of EarthBound that turns the game's original upbeat mood of lighthearted, courageous adventure into that of a fearful, psychologically warped tale based on the willingness of game players to fulfill what they are obligated to do, even when it goes against their wishes.
It was born of a combination of many things I had been thinking about at the time - the lack of non-stereotypical, major homosexual characters in media, the staleness of a fifteen-year-old video game, the player's conciousness of their own decisions in video games, and the fact that it seemed that most people generally thought I was just "another funny guy."
First, I changed Ness, the baseball-hatted tweenage protagonist of EarthBound into Varik, a mysterious, shadowy-faced medieval bounty hunter. This serves to alienate the player from the idea of the EarthBound theme, and set a darker mood.
I transformed EarthBound's friendly (but generic) Twoson into a familiar, autumn-themed experience, one flavored with pumpkin bread, snarky dialogue, and amateurishly edited enemies with changed colors. I revamped and remixed all of the dialogue in every conceivably viewable location in the town, reinforcing the holiday fare and infusing the game with my own taste. I remixed the music to the LOVE THEME of the game's sequel, MOTHER 3.
A bright fall day. I wanted it to seem like a regular, funny, lazy hack, tainted only by the order to kill "a monster" given by the town's prospective mayor - who even gives a friendly chuckle after telling you an explicitly gory exposition of the game's plot.
I even released a trailer for the game with lots of heavy breathing and then a brief clip of one of the funnier parts of the game, in order to make it seem like I was making light of the holiday. It was a trailer pretending that a funny game was scary. In reality it was a trailer pretending to be a trailer for a funny game that is scary; it was actually a trailer for a scary game that pretends to be funny.
After a brief trip through the hippie-and-ghost-filled sewers, however, this fact becomes obvious. After a black screen describes the player's journey deep into the underbelly of the earth, the player finds themselves trapped inside a "new" part of the sewers, with rivers of blackened blood instead of sewage, where ectoplasm makes ear-piercing screams and undead, homicidal cadavers of the previously seen hippies lurch toward you. There are no more simple color changes. There is nothing more copied from the original game to comfort you with its familiarity. Monsters shamble towards you and gasp with empty eyes, muttering incoherently, dribbling unknown substances.
And yet the player presses forward, because that's what they've been commanded to do by the mayor. It's what they're obligated to do.
After wading through streams of blood, the player finds himself in the Land of Doom, a greatly altered version of EarthBound's Christmasy "Winters" area. The player, still unable to return, is now faced with one of the few choices they're allowed in the entire game: to kill the survivors running around for food, or let them live. You don't have to. Or you can. It's not encouraged by anyone. I personally don't do it. But if a gaming construct really matters, who's to say they aren't going to be killed anyway?
Finally, the protagonist reaches the lab present in the original EarthBound - and again there is no escape. The phone line is dead. The stairs lead nowhere. EarthBound's Dr. Andonuts stands stoically, his importance foreshadowed by dialogue back in Twoson, ominously facing away from the player. Talking to him initiates the first of his lines from EarthBound.
These turn out to be a horrible misinterpretation. Dr. Andonuts, wracked with guilt over killing his own child and his friends (an extrapolation of their dealings with the time-space continuum in the original game), disappears into the world of his own mind using a special device. The protagonist is given one final "choice:" turn off the game, or kill Dr. Andonuts. There is a two choice prompt with one option.
Dr. Andonuts is killed.
Or, due to a relatively unknown programming exploit, you can press the "B" button as a THIRD choice, entering Dr. Andonut's mind and grappling with new monsters and situations on a quest to recover his courage for him and deal with physical manifestations of his social insecurities, his memories of his dead wife, his guilt about his unseen family, and the consequences of his own repressed homosexuality.
This triples the length of the game.
Ultimately, you find Dr. Andonuts deep within the confines of his own Id, imprisoned and warped into a grotesque form, fearful of the protagonist - actually driven to tears by YOU, the player, and your unabashed pursuit of him into his own world. Against an old man's wishes, the player fights him, proving the inevitability of Dr. Andonuts' deaths and the futility of the player's choices and proving that completely new songs CAN be made by editing EarthBound's pre-existing music.
The game ends.
But not before it anticlimaxes and a goast poots on u. I am, after all, just a funny guy.