Like a long-time partner or a favorite pair of socks, there is comfort in revisiting a familiar game from your childhood. It’s easy to know what’s in each treasure chest, which forest the enemy will spawn from, or the secret trick that defeats the enemy with ease. That sentimental appeal makes games like these an easy nostalgic choice when you just want to take a load off.
But what if you want to add some spice back to that familiar experience? After playing a classic game to the point of memory, how do you recapture the sense of adventure and discovery you experienced the first time you played it? A small but growing community in the retro renaissance scene aims to answer those questions with a class of mods and hacks called “randomizers.”
Shuffle up and deal
At their most basic level, random mods mix data in a game’s ROM so that each run becomes a new and unexpected experience. Therefore The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past Randomizer can change which items you find in which boxes, swap rewards from dungeon quests, and even replace Link’s sprite for one of many fan-created options (the Mega Man X sprite is personal preference). And you can go even further than that, changing the exit locations for various in-game doors or even scattering boss keys for specific dungeons throughout the world (rather than in the dungeons themselves)!
What started as a small niche has now evolved into its own retrogaming genre. The “BIG List of Video Game Contributors” website.started back in 2016, now lists hundreds of random mods for games from Metroid Prime, Golden Sun, we had The earth to Faxanadu, Adventure Island, we had Destruction. We also update the list each week with new titles, so if your favorite isn’t listed yet, it might be soon.
Different randomizer mods allow for different levels of randomness, but the idea of mixing the positions of items or discovered skills and abilities is rather standard. Some of the planned title stops but change the games and things you see on your journey. Others completely change the way the game is played.
Two games at once
One of the more scaled killers out there is a combination of two games in a way that you have to beat them both in one playthrough. Inside Super Metroid x Link to the Past Randomizer mod, you use special random portals to navigate between the worlds of Hyrule and Zebes, collecting items in one to help you progress further to the other. There is a very real chance that Link’s uncle can give you the high boots that allow Samus to go claim the Master’s sword somewhere deep in Norfair.
Randomizers add an endlessly refreshing approach to boring games, with new challenges for players to overcome with each playthrough. They test the player’s skill and knowledge of the game rather than just the muscle memory gained from years of experience. By limiting the player’s ability to rely on their autopilot memory, the focus will shift instead to speed change and problem solving.
A basic knowledge of the game is still useful in a wizard, though, even if it’s just to help you figure out what new paths might open up with each new thing you find. Perhaps you will be forced to fight a difficult enemy with less resources than you might normally have. Or maybe you’ll be asked to consider keeping a team member with a special skill even though they might survive a serious accident.
Even if you only have a passing memory of the classic game, there are many resources and guides available to you that can help. These range from beginner’s guides with basic instructions for approaching making a randomizer to full-on the conductors that can show you what areas become accessible as you get new items.
I like to watch
I first stumbled upon the game-randomizer subculture two years ago, when I stumbled upon a Twitch stream of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (Ltd moving forward) that I first tried to understand. There, I noticed a character that was definitely not Link finding things in boxes where they weren’t specified. A quick trip down the Google-search rabbit hole explained what was going on and cemented my interest in this strange new world of fresh retro gameplay. Since then, I have dabbled in a randomizer for the valley Castlevania titles, Super Metroid, Fire Emblem, Ocarina of Timewe had Final Fantasy (4, 5, 6). Each new mod only digs me deeper into the randomizer hole.
When I talk to other people who baptize in the venue, my exposure through Twitch seems to be far from rare. While a few stumbled upon the idea through random Internet searches, most seem to have come across the area a year or two ago by watching live streams. They range from smaller streams and larger charity stream events such as Awesome Games Made Fast, RPG Limit Breakand the recently held The Quest for Glory 3 A speedrun event just a few weeks back. And with the upcoming 2020 fast-paced Awesome games set to feature both Ltd we had Mario 64 randomizers, a whole new group of watchers will be introduced to these Mods.
Some of the most famous contributors – including Super Metroid, Selidaand the world Final Fantasy IV randomizers—have achieved their popularity in large part thanks to rapid community adoption. Final Fantasy IV: Free Enterprise is one such randomizer. Originally released in 2018, Free Enterprise allows players to break away from the strict narrative structure of the original title to participate in an open-world scavenger hunt, finding items that will eventually be sent to capture the game’s final boss. A month after releasing the mod, Free EnterpriseThe Discord server has more than one user dedicated to making the original faster Final Fantasy IV. A year after its release, the game featured in the Awesome Games Made Fast 2019the biggest video game love event on the planet.
Tournaments and races have become a staple of the organizer community, with large events hosted by a number of organizers, including Challonge, SpeedRunsLive, and SpeedGaming. Back in the fall of 2017, the organizers of the LttP Rando The competition found the demand for their event to be far higher than they had anticipated. After their initial 100-player cap was filled, they had to organize a 150-person overflow tournament to satisfy demand. As of spring 2018, the same tournament had 512 registered players and would have received more if the seeding software could support it.
Today, if you stop by SpeedRunsLiveyou can expect to see multiple randomizer races going on at any given time, with a larger schedule LttP Randomizer The tournament brings in over 100 players. Daily Ltd race on SpeedGaming attracts hundreds of regular viewers, and the annual SpeedGaming Live event introducing randomizer contests for the first time in October with a prize pool of $3,000.
These numbers will not give birth to esports behemoths Fortnite or League of Legends reason to be afraid, but they at least show the potential for the idea to grow one day from a niche to a profitable spectator sport.
Audience numbers aside, the players, developers, event organizers, and viewers I spoke to all agreed that the growing class of mods has breathed new life into familiar older titles. The new ability to replay an old game and get a new adventure each time also creates a sense of wonder and discovery that we have the first time we put it out of the original cartridge or disc.
Nostalgia is a powerful thing, and while the creators will never fully replace the first experiences with these games that we love, they can make them feel new and new time and time again.
A special thanks to everyone in the SpeedGaming, RPG Limit Break, Free Enterprise, and LttP Rando communities who were kind enough to answer my questions and share with me their experiences and knowledge.
Image list by Nintendo