Archive of Our Own ^beta

[The following is an archival of a thread on a now-defunct message board.  Sensitive information is withheld for safety and privacy.]

So this one is going to be a bit of a long shot, but has anyone ever heard of a ROM hacker by the name of ████████?  I'll explain why, but it's going to be a long one, so...strap in, I guess.

It all happened about a week ago—late one summer night, with a house to myself and a whole lot of nothing to do.  I was feeling nostalgic for a series I hadn’t really thought about in a few years—the Mega Man series.  It had to have been at least a decade since I’d played the first ones, and, on a whim, I decided to fix that that night.  I haven't really known where to go to get ROMs since Emuparadise went down, so I just searched "mega man NES game ROM download" and hoped for the best.

After dodging some of the more untrustworthy-looking sites, I came upon a site I'd never heard of before—████████.com.  A quick look around revealed it to be a personal fan site, and from the web design, I could tell it was an old one.  Pasted-in official artwork of Robot Masters from across the series framed an ugly backdrop and weirdly colored buttons.  Despite my eyes' protests, I combed the website, and lo and behold, there was a ROM download for good ol' Mega Man .

In hindsight, that should've been weird to me.  Just the original Mega Man ?  There was little reason not to host all of them, or at least all six of the NES titles.  At the time, though, I paid that no mind; I just collected my ROM and left.  After a quick virus scan for the sake of my sanity, I fired up my emulator and started up the game.

I didn’t notice a thing wrong with the ROM when I started it up. Maybe there was nothing wrong with it at the time. I'm not sure at this point. I just went through the title screen and started the run the only way one can start a Mega Man run:  against the butt of the joke, Cut Man.

Nothing was weird about the level itself. The floating clamshell guys and the scissor traps chipped away at my health bar, resulting in a death at the hands of the Big Eye towards the end of the level, but when I did reach Cut Man himself, I dispatched him without any trouble.

…At least, I thought I would, but here's where the story gets interesting. After the ninth hit, when Cut Man was reduced to 1 health point, the game started to…hang. The audio froze in place, continually playing the same note, and both the boss and I couldn't move. Then, in the blink of an eye, a bunch of junk data continually flashed onscreen. It happened so quickly I didn't register what all of it was, but it looked like chopped up assets from the ending cutscene—including, in the center, what looked like parts of a character sprite?

Just as quickly as it started, it stopped, before I could identify them. The level clear jingle started to blare as the game abruptly cut back to the gameplay, with Cut Man gone. As the game tallied up my score and sent me back to the stage select, I pondered what I'd just seen. Mega Man had a reputation for its glitches, but one that kills bosses for you…well, that'd be a new one to me.

At the time, I shrugged that off, opting to continue the weakness cycle with Elec Man. As I entered, I opened the weapon select menu to dispatch the Spines, only to face another bizarre happening:

I didn’t have Rolling Cutter.

Now, I knew the original Mega Man wasn’t exactly a polished product—but a bug where a defeated Robot Master just…didn’t give a weapon?  That was a new one, even for me.  I think I knew, at this point, that there had to be something deeper going on here—but at the time, I didn’t really care what it was, and I was bored enough that trying to beat Mega Man with no special weapons sounded like fun, so I set out to do just that…well, not before taking a moment to review RoahmMythril’s perfect strategy for Elec Man.

The stage went by in just a few minutes; even the brief disappearing tile segments, which historically gave me a little trouble, didn’t slow me at all today. The timing came to me naturally, and within seconds, Elec Man was down…or so I thought he'd be, were it not for the fact the glitch happened again.  It felt a little more pronounced this time—it went on for more than just a split second, and pieces of that character appeared in the center again.  This time, I got a better look, and I noticed two things quickly:  first, the character in question was Roll; second, there were more than just a couple graphics dedicated to her now.  I didn’t get to look over all of them before the game cut back to the level, but it looked like she had… animations —for running, jumping, throwing, and maybe more.

Roll didn't have any more than the one sprite in Mega Man .  It was an NES game over 30 years old by this point; if she had anything else, someone would have found it and ripped it by now.  I knew by now that what I was playing wasn't the original Mega Man —I figured it had to be some buggy, unfinished ROM hack made by ████████.  But why would they release it in its current state?

I decided to check the website again, on the off chance that I could go and ask them myself.  Reopening my closed tab, I braved ████████.com’s dated interface, and eventually, at the bottom, I spied an email link.  I hammered out a message quickly—trying to be as polite as possible, and admittedly being pretty vague as a result. I quickly explained that I’d run into their hack while looking for a ROM for the original Mega Man , I’d seemed to run into a bug, and I was hoping to get some more information on it and its intended behavior.  I sent it, and then…I waited a little bit.  Got up from my seat, grabbed a can of soda.

…Who was I kidding?  I didn’t even know if ████████ still checked that email at all, and even if they did, they definitely wouldn’t at this hour.  I turned my attention back to the game (I was certainly still bored enough to play it)—now that I knew I wouldn’t have special weapons, I turned my attention to what I figured was the next easiest Robot Master, Bomb Man.

This time, the bug happened as the level started—"READY" blinked at me through a wall of junk data that slowly melted away to reveal the more familiar tiles. The rest of the level played out like you'd expect, with one key difference:  those splitting-bomb enemies that pop out of bottomless pits throughout the level? Not one of them showed up.  Not that I was complaining, those enemies only ever served to waste time.

I got to Bomb Man, and you can probably guess where this is going by now.  This time the glitch didn’t even have the dignity to wait until I’d reduced him to 1 health; junk data spilled onto the screen at around 10 health and finished the deed for me.  

Looking at the stage select again, I realized I'd have to replay Elec Man's stage to get the Magnet Beam, and I figured I'd better get that out of the way now. Selecting him, however, didn't cause his sprite to appear on the stage start screen.  Then, when the level began, it was…nothing. Mega Man just warped into a black emptiness. It was like everything relating to Elec Man and his stage was completely gone.  I watched as Mega Man fell through screen after screen of nothing; it must have fallen for at least 30 seconds.  Then, like it would when the glitch was about to dispose of a boss, the game hanged for a moment, cut to pure black—then, slowly, a message started to print (Surrounded by junk data here and there):

The message remained onscreen for about ten seconds before I was once again left staring at the stage select screen.  There was only one person who could be saying that—one ally who was “helping” Mega Man against these adversaries.  Roll.  I guess somehow, the game was interpreting what she was doing as helping him defeat the bosses, but it obviously wasn't in any way that made sense to the game…

The next three Robot Master stages were a blur.  No longer content to wait for the bosses, Roll appeared on a tide of junk data during the levels now, at seemingly random intervals.  Seeing her a little more frequently, I began to notice she’d taken on attributes matching those of the Robot Masters she’d gained—that bolt-shaped pattern on Elec Man’s mask now protruded from her head of hair, and the red and yellow of Bomb Man’s armor had joined the patterns on her dress.  It finally dawned on me:  Roll hadn’t just been defeating the bosses, she’d been amalgamating them into herself.   She hadn't been content with merely stealing their weapons like Mega Man would, she stole away their entire beings. 

And it seemed she craved to steal more.  With each of her appearances, there were fewer enemies, fewer hazards—and her collection of graphics grew more grandiose, even as she degenerated to look less and less like herself.  The traps in Fire Man’s stage spontaneously turned off completely.  The penguins in Ice Man’s stage vanished along with the Crazy Razies.  By the time I was at my final Robot Master, Guts Man, there were no entities left in the level at all—with the Guts Lifts gone, I was left to walk along a series of junk tiles at the bottom of the screen, and even the spikes from the dropping section had been replaced with more of the same.  The bosses that were left weren't even being given a sporting chance anymore, Roll obliterating each of them the moment they appeared. 

Soon enough, I was left with only Dr. Wily himself, standing alone among the black spaces where the Robot Masters should have been. Ironically, they had been stolen back from him…but in a way I don't think either of us would have ever expected.  I smiled wryly as he clambered into his classic UFO, as if nothing was wrong.  How could he know what awaited him, anyway?

And so I marched through Wily's castle, rendered utterly empty by Roll's rampaging—she’d taken even the Super Arm blocks.  Dimly, I thought about the enemies that would normally fill these screens, and I couldn’t help but be put off at how this castle once littered with threats now had nothing in it.

Eventually I approached the last room, where Magnet Beam would be required, but it seemed Roll had thought of that too, and left me a haphazard ladder of junk data to climb.  Yellow Devil didn’t even show up to his own boss chamber; when I arrived there, the game snapped me into the next level—a reverie that proved short-lived, as when I reached the room where you would normally re-fight Cut Man, the game simply…hanged there.  I thought the game had finally softlocked on me, for trying to load data that seemed to no longer exist on the cart—but after about ten seconds of hanging, the game abruptly snapped to…the ending sequence.

The familiar lines of text appeared, or at least, they tried to—most of the message had been mangled, mixed in with bits of tilesets from the Robot Master stages.  Only two words at the very end had remained untouched:  EVERLASTING PEACE .  Mega Man warped in like usual, but instead of starting to run right away, he just stood there and waited…and after a few seconds, who would warp in beside him but…Roll.

She had once again transformed, but no longer was she nigh-unrecognizable—the chaotic patterns of junk data that once covered her hair and dress had given way to her familiar blonde, and weaved themselves into an elaborate, frilly pattern.  Wings, of all things, sprouted from her back now, and she wore a beaming smile that I might almost find comforting, were I not burdened with the knowledge of what she’d done to obtain it.  Of course, it being the only visible part of her face wasn’t helping much, the rest having been surrendered to a black void.

Text started to print at the bottom of the screen—Roll must have taken control of the credits to talk to me.  Or, talk to Mega Man, as it were:

That explained the familiar-looking “wings.”  She started to run off to the left, but Mega Man didn’t follow—after fumbling for a moment, I realized I was still controlling him.  Now morbidly curious, I decided to run alongside her as she continued to speak.

Distantly, I recalled a piece of trivia I heard somewhere once—that, when they were first built, Rock and Roll had almost identical specifications and AI.  It all clicked.  Everything Roll had been doing was something her programming would have compelled her to do.  Perhaps she went to these extremes because she wasn’t equipped for combat like Mega Man was…or maybe…

…she just did it because she wanted to.  Did she really not feel any remorse?  The robots she’d amalgamated into herself were once her allies, brothers, even.  I guess with all their strength combined, she thought she was above them now.  …I feel silly saying it, after the fact, but I tightened my grip on my controller.  At the time, I was totally invested.

I didn’t get to hear the rest of Roll’s speech.  Why?  …You have to understand, at this point, it’s past 3 AM, and I’m cracked up on caffeine.  I guess my hands were shaking so much I didn’t notice my finger slipping.  Either way, I hit the fire button by accident, and Mega Man fired a shot straight into the back of his own sister.

Her smile faltered as she reeled.  She clutched at her face to hide her scowl.  Little pieces of junk data started appearing in the air around her.  I knew I’d made a mistake.

This time, Roll cut herself off.

I couldn’t see one, but I knew the sound of a health bar filling anywhere.  I knew what was coming next.

Her movements were slow at first—she shot a plain Fire Storm, just like the copied version. Then she took a few paces forward, then came an Ice Slasher, then she hoisted a Super Arm block (Made of random junk data) and tossed it. All easy enough to avoid; it seemed that, despite all the power she'd gained, she had never actually used it in a way the game understood before now. All the while, I fired shot after shot at her—

And then, all at once, she vanished.  Moments later, a cloud of junk data coalesced, and she reappeared in the air above me, wings aflutter in a crude two-frame animation.  She continued in this manner—spastically warping around the screen, occasionally pausing to perform an attack, not unlike a Wily Capsule.

And what attacks she had.  Occasionally they were straightforward—firing the Thunder Beam weapon after teleporting, so the projectile that goes down would be aimed right at me—but others got a little more…bizarre.  Once her arm abruptly fell off, and she just started playing catch with it using a corkscrewing Rolling Cutter, even as it dragged itself around on the ground.  Once she tore her own head off, lit up her ponytail with a Fire Storm, and then threw it at the ground to create a massive explosion (It even used the boss death animation as if they were projectiles).

At times, it seemed to me like not even she knew what she was going to do next.  Thoughts like this were reinforced by moments where she appeared, then seemed to recoil as her body fell apart into junk data that grew and changed shape until it was some form of composite made of the other castle bosses and background tile data.  I remember one that was a golem wielding a spiked club made of a Guts Lift rail—as it crudely swung its club, Guts Lifts floating on nothing trawled overhead.  I’m pretty sure I was supposed to jump up and shoot it in the head, but at this point I was panicking—I fired at its leg instead, and the leg fell off, awkwardly hopping in place and causing a staggering quake a la Guts Man each time it touched the ground.

I wish I could tell you more about the fight.  I get the impression that there was a lot more to it than what I got to see.  But those quakes in conjunction with a stray Ice Slasher brought my fight against her to an unceremonious end.  And when my health hit 0, just like it did for other bosses, the game started to hang—and the emulator crashed.  No error message, just closed itself.  I was left staring back at the directory I’d stored the ROM in, with its name changed—from “Mega Man” to “POWERTRIP.”

I tried to boot the ROM up again.  It still worked—took me straight to the title screen like usual.  But when I pressed Start?  Nothing.  Tried every button on my controller.  Nothing.  After a few minutes, I just decided to close out of it and go to bed.  It wouldn’t dawn on me what was going on until later:  Roll had taken code from everything else in the game and made it a part of herself.  I guess by defeating Mega Man, she was able to access the code that let the player control him, and…dispose of it.

It’s been about a week since then, and ████████ still hasn’t returned any of my emails.  I checked the website again while I was writing all this; the contact links and the download link for the ROM are gone now, and I have no idea why.  I know some people are probably going to think I’m making this up, but I know I didn’t just imagine the whole thing, I still have the corrupted ROM to prove it.

Though it seems ████████ may be trying to, I feel like I can’t just forget about this, because this ROM hack did so much crazy stuff I’d never seen before—manipulating data in the ROM in real time, or at least giving a very convincing illusion of that, so a character gains “new” sprites, entire stages “disappear,” so on and so forth.  And in an MM1 hack, no less!  I’d think if this person were making hacks like this, they’d be really famous in the Mega Man community, or at least have a cult following.

So again, I’ll ask: Does anyone know ████████?  Ever received a message back from their email link?  Has anyone else even played “Mega Man:  POWERTRIP?”  Or…am I the only one?

[True to his own prediction, many of the replies to the thread accused the original poster of having fabricated the events he described.  When asked to upload the corrupted ROM in question, he sheepishly answered he’d discovered it couldn’t be uploaded, as any file sharing site deemed it “potentially malicious.”  The thread stood for around four months before the forum was closed due to declining traffic.  In the time it stood, no one who made a reply had played the hack or heard of the hacker.]