On this day, three years ago, I created and released this short hack onto Metroid Construction. In commemoration, I'm gonna go into detail on how this strange, low-effort romp came to be.
In late February/early March 2020, my drive to hack Metroid Fusion had kicked back in after a year or so of focusing on other ventures. I wanted to make something short just to test the waters of what could be done with the game (it's been one of the lesser hacked games in the series due to its forced linear progression, by gameplay and by code). Ideas I had included a minihack with just a few powerups, or a boss rush that operated within the limits of the game's event system. I started work on the latter idea in MAGE (Metroid Advance Game Editor), but didn't go beyond some placeholder graphics and minor level stuff before it sorta just brickwalled.
The day after that, after getting all my schoolwork done early (something fairly rare), I decided I'd blow off some steam by making something really stupid. Taking inspiration from memes from years prior involving Nintendo characters in games where they do mundane tasks, I decided that this proposed hack's premise would be Samus getting Adam a glass of milk from the fridge. The first thing I did was write Adam's briefing text, whose last part I recall being "im thirsty af" instead of "god im thirsty" at first, but my earliest ROM backup contains the latter.
The next thing I did was start doing the little room edits, goofy item texts, as well as editing the Subzero Containment's tileset to have the milk. The fridge room wasn't without difficulty, though, since the Omega Metroid was a bit finnicky to work with. I ended up using the escape sequence's Docking Bay room as a base for the fridge room so that the boss could actually work. It also took a bit of fiddling to get an asm patch to take out the SA-X part of the Omega fight to do its thing, had to go through some trial-and-error before making it cut to the credits after defeating it (which, by the way, also weren't edited because there was no credits editor for the game at the time and I wasn't willing to try working around the weird way they work in the game).
EDIT: Forgot to mention the audio stuff. The Doom E2M8 midislap was something I'd done over a year prior for something else, was just looking for a quick thing to add to this hack so that was it. Also thought the Windows 3.1 startup sound would be cute for the item pickup noise, so I did it.
EDIT 2: Also the Omega Metroid, and how it appears really glitchy. It appears this way because of how the game loads in the graphics for messages (in this case, the "u has the milk" message)--it overwrites part of the sprite graphics, part of which the Omega Metroid's graphics are designed under the assumption it's free to use, yet here I was adding in an object that overwrites that space.
After the scant level design was done, I focused on the title graphics and the ending images. The drawing I did for the only ending screen you can feasibly obtain in the hack is of an older OC of mine, the Power Cow. They were created way back in middle school, when a friend asked me to draw a cow in a Samus-like suit, and the end result had him howling, so it became an inside joke, and the nostalgia I had for that time led me to bring the character back for this, after some years of dormancy.
And after all that, I prepared an IPS patch by 11PM, and it was time to submit to Metconst. Yet at this point, this quick, dumb project seemed like a "funnier in my heard" sort of thing, and I was unsure how people were going to take to me submitting such a thing. I felt like people would get a quick laugh out of the title, realize how near-nothing the hack was, and just move on from acknowledging its existence.
Once I released the hack, it got some fair laughs.
Such continued in the weeks and months that followed. It didn't fade from existence after all.
In the time since, I made two sequels to this hack, and got them all onto RHDN. The latter in particular caught some newer eyes, particularly leading to RetroAchievements support for the first two hacks to pop up, in addition to speedrun leaderboards for them. As such, the little culture that spawned around the series is quite flattering.
And that's how it all started, just a short burst of work in an evening for this short hack, and here we are.
