in the interest of finding stuff to post here more often, here's an idea I've always had bouncing around the back of my mind:

There should be romhacks that merely add secrets to existing games. As in, someone strictly playing the critical path of the game, would find no differences between the original and the hack. But someone who poked around, would find things beneath the surface -- maybe small, maybe huge -- in all of the places that you expected something to be hidden as a kid, but that never panned out.

And in particular, the audience should be invited to play the hack, with the knowledge that new secrets exist, but without being told exactly where..... You'd get to play the game you love, but with an invitation to experiment again. To know that anything is possible, the way it was when you were playing it for the first time!

Maybe it's shallow nostalgia, but doesn't it sound like a fun project?

Somehow the idea of sitting down and just doing a single romhack like that in a vacuum feels silly or self-centered, but I've always been tempted to organize a game jam where everyone picks a different game to hack new secrets into, and then we all get to compare what sorts of things we each felt each game was missing.....