I've revisited a ROM hack I made ten years ago today and recorded a new video from the same emulator playback file I used to make the original, at a much higher resolution than I was able to back then. More backstory and graphics behind the cut.❤️
A few days more than ten years ago, a games maker named Mike Mika (who's now President of Digital Eclipse, though at the time I believe he was still with their predecessor, Other Ocean) made news with a ROM hack of the NES version of Donkey Kong that lets you play as Pauline. (To be precise, he was savvy enough to hack Nintendo's own 2010 hack that added back a previously missing stage from the original arcade version.) The story went that his young daughter innocently asked, "Why can't I play as her?"—and figuring he probably knew enough to make that happen, he worked through the night to produce Donkey Kong: Pauline Edition.
I thought that was really nice, and it inspired me to spend the next couple days bringing a similar idea to life: a hack of Super Mario Bros. where you play as Peach and rescue Mario. For the indicating due credit to its inspiration, I called it Super Mario Bros.: Peach Edition. I had never made any hacks before, but, you know, it was Super Mario Bros., so there were tools around that made it easy enough for me—especially since I was just replacing assets that were already there.
A very preliminary idea was just to drop in Peach's SMB2 sprites if I could, but I quickly decided I'd rather draw frames from scratch that would fit SMB1's aesthetic. And it turned out it wouldn't have worked otherwise, as there are cases where the individual graphics tiles that make up the player character are shared across multiple animation frames. For example, the animations for climbing a beanstalk/descending a flagpole, swimming, and throwing a fireball all have an animation frame sharing the same two topmost rows of 8x8 tiles. So those tiles need to be drawn to match the rest of the body however it appears in all three animations. On top of that, swimming and throwing a fireball share the third row as well. And on top of that, throwing a fireball shares its bottom row with a frame from the walk cycle. So there are dependencies~
Everyone knows Mario's turning pose when he skids to a stop is the coolest sprite in the game, so I took special care to do justice to it with Peach's~ I remember I was so pleased to see it in motion.
And with the roles reversed, there of course had to be a captive Mario to replace Peach at the end of the game. Unfortunately, his palette is shared with the Podoboos in the castle courses, and the colours used here would have changed their appearance a bit. So in the interest of altering as little as possible about the game other than what I meant to, his colours are rearranged a bit in the final product. (And just like Peach, since he only appears in a castle course, the transparency to the black background is used as an implied "fifth colour" for his eyes.)
Shortly after the hack was hosted on ROMHacking.net, I was contacted by some other members of the site, asking permission to make a revision that would alter the title of the game on the title screen. I gently declined for philosophical reasons: I don't want the player to feel like they need to play a game other than Super Mario Bros. in order to play as Peach. If possible, I just want them to feel like they can play as Peach in Super Mario Bros. Hopefully that makes sense to anyone besides me~
To date, this remains my only ROM hack. But I made it for a specific purpose, which I think it serves. I really don't have any regrets about it, which is rare with my creative endeavours. ❤️ And I'm glad it's been downloaded by thousands of people and is still available to everyone, so many years later.