Information about Dragon Pervert hack
Oct 25, 2014 19:59:58 GMT -5
Post by mattrva77 on Oct 25, 2014 19:59:58 GMT -5
So, I know I'm bumping an old thread... and while this is my first post HERE, I know enough about forum etiquette in general to know that's usually frowned upon. However, I think this may be a worthy exception. Ya see, me and my little brother made all of the graphics in Dragon Pervert. Literally all of them. At the time I was going by the moniker "twiggy", and I thought it would be a good idea to connect with like-minded ROM hackers and start the first ever "crew" of ROM hackers that I'm aware of: the Spooky Kids Hack Posse.
A recent bout of nostalgia led to me digging out all my old NES/FC stuff, and doing Google searches for "Dragon Pervert" and "Spooky Kids Hack Posse" -- which lead me here, among other places. I am AMAZED at some of the things possible in modern ROM hacking, and moreover somewhat amazed that D.P. is still seen as one of the pinnacles of (non-translation) ROM hacking. With that out of the way, I have quite a few things I'd like to say on this thread.
First, off Joseph Joestar -- holy shit man, what is GOOD?! It's been.... what, 16 years?! You left out your translation work for "Musashi no Bouken" also, which was actually probably the most in-depth. romhacking.net actually has our old patch up, with the original readme.txt if you'd like a nostalgia hadouken. In total, the three translations discussed or attempted by SKHP were Sweet Home, Musashi no Bouken, and Ys. None of them got very far for reasons discussed thoroughly in this thread, haha. It's a shame -- but the good news is that all of those games HAVE been translated now, and in at least one of the instances our work went toward the final product (Musashi).
Second off, here's the REAL and "official" story on Dragon Pervert... straight from the whore-se's mouth. Much like Joseph Joestar mentioned, this was a LONG time (and many, many drugs for me) ago, and thusly quite a bit of it's pretty foggy. That said, I think I can offer quite a bit of insight.
SKHP started in late '97 or early '98 sometime, during the initial wave of ROM hacking promulgated by AC2K and his "One-Stop ROM Hack Shop" or w/e it was called. I was 13 or 14 years old. My little brother ("Bomb") was 11 or 12. Keep this in mind when viewing Dragon Pervert: none of us knew shit about actual sex. One of the early hacks AC2K had done was called "Dragon Warrior XXX" -- and it is this hack that has often shown up as the "first" version of D.P. and has led to the confusion over his involvement, and the authorship in general.
Pretty shortly thereafter, I met DJW (later Gemma2k among other nicks) on irc. I could be wrong, but I don't think he was really a part of the "NES scene" so much as the "romhacking scene". At any rate, he was another young teenager who was interested in joining forces with the Spooky Kids. Most people who joined SKHP were from one of three categories (or some admixture of the three). They were either friends from real life (we'll throw my little brother in there, along with Figment, and EvilAmoeba); kids from the NES scene who I was friends with on IRC, etc (Monster_Turtle among others); or, established ROM hackers whose work and spirit was right in line with the group (Kasady, who took over the group after I left, Pachuka [unfortunately] and then later other guys including popehentai fit in there). *FOR THE RECORD, POPEHENTAI IS -NOT- PACHUKA*. DJW wasn't really like any of the other members. He had no real hacking experience, was not an established part of the NES'98 clique, and wasn't one of the kids I hung out with in real life. He really only worked on one hack ever (as a member of the Spooky Kids anyway), and I don't think most of the other members of SKHP really even knew him at all. What DJW was, was a kid with a big idea. ....
"Dragon Warrior XXX" was kinda funny and all, but what if we actually hacked EVERY SINGLE SPRITE, EVERY SINGLE ENEMY AND EVERY SINGLE BIT OF TEXT IN AN ENTIRE RPG? That was the goal, anyway. (www.badderhacks.net actually has a hilarious play-through review of Dragon Pervert which points out that somehow, some way, we entirely forgot to change the fucking DragonLord, but I digress -- and will return to this later.) I could be making this up entirely, but I seem to recall DJW contacting AC2k about Dragon Pervert, since it did take a few pages from the book of DWXXX -- but only a few. We were hoping to do something much more thorough, complete, and degenerate, however.
My brother and I began graphic work on D.P. (as the two of us, as a team, were mostly in charge of all the graphics in most of the early Spooky Kids hacks), and after we had completed about 9/10 of the monsters, the title screen, and all of the character sprites, we turned it over to DJW to work his magic with the text. This resulting "beta" version of Dragon Pervert is the "Dragon Pervert (Spooky Kids) (Older)" version of if you may see up on ROM sites.
However, as has remained typical in the ROM hacking community to this very day, we would always distribute our hacks as .ips patches on the Spooky Kids site. This seems to be the reason behind the countless different "versions" of Dragon Pervert and DWXXX floating around. At some point, it seems, someone actually applied the Dragon Pervert IPS patch over DWXXX, leading to ever more confusion -- to where, at present, the two hacks are more or less seen as "versions" of the same thing. I'll never forget how mad and confused I was when I opened up a copy of DWXXX to see what everyone was talking about and saw all of MY sprites and background modifications included there. But, I don't think AC2k had anything to do with that at all.
So, after releasing the initial patch things went on as normal. DJW was the type of guy who you wouldn't talk to for months and then would suddenly show up in IRC, and this one time he did that, he had "100% finished" Dragon Pervert (?!). Up the patch went, and ROM hacking history was made. The funny thing is, I had just played through DW1 on my NES that summer, and so I couldn't bring myself to do much playtesting. Apparently no one else who did the playtesting for us made it to the end of the game, either, since everyone reported back that, yes indeed, every single monster and bit of text was altered. How we completely forgot the main boss, regarding whom we had altered every single bit of text in the story, is beyond me. But I was 14, and by then beginning to experiment with drugs pretty heavily.
As Joseph Joestar said, D.P. really didn't make THAT much of a splash in the scene at the time. Don't get me wrong, people loved it and we were all VERY proud of the end result, but ALL of the hacks at that time were horrifically offensive and in awful taste. Dragon Pervert was just one of many. The one thing about D.P. that did make a bit of a splash in the ROM hacking community, and the thing I'm still proud of today, is that it was the first ROM hack (that I know of) with an altered title screen that wasn't complete shit. I actually had to find and alter a blank tile, and then use hex editor to construct the new title screen -- much like changing text, only waaaay more complex. I even edited the tiles of the little sparkle/glimmer thing to make it line up properly on the edited logo. Since then, no ROM hack worth its salt has been able to get away with leaving the title screen intact.
I think that's just about all I really have to say for this particular bit of history. I could go into WAY more detail on the beginnings of the ROM hacking scene in general, or the history of the Spooky Kids, or any number of things -- but that's beyond the scope of this particular thread. As for the NES'98 crowd... I kept in contact with phifey (Brett), OctoPooki (Tom Lowrie), and hayabusa (Tim McGruder) for years, but more or less lost touch with pretty much EVERYONE in the years right after highschool. I'd love to hear from anyone from back then, but especially any of those guys.
Feel free to ask any questions any of you may or may not have... I work a desk job these days so if there's one thing I've got, it's plenty of time to sit on my ass on the internet.
And long live NES'98!! Like seriously, I'm thinking about getting a tattoo.
A recent bout of nostalgia led to me digging out all my old NES/FC stuff, and doing Google searches for "Dragon Pervert" and "Spooky Kids Hack Posse" -- which lead me here, among other places. I am AMAZED at some of the things possible in modern ROM hacking, and moreover somewhat amazed that D.P. is still seen as one of the pinnacles of (non-translation) ROM hacking. With that out of the way, I have quite a few things I'd like to say on this thread.
First, off Joseph Joestar -- holy shit man, what is GOOD?! It's been.... what, 16 years?! You left out your translation work for "Musashi no Bouken" also, which was actually probably the most in-depth. romhacking.net actually has our old patch up, with the original readme.txt if you'd like a nostalgia hadouken. In total, the three translations discussed or attempted by SKHP were Sweet Home, Musashi no Bouken, and Ys. None of them got very far for reasons discussed thoroughly in this thread, haha. It's a shame -- but the good news is that all of those games HAVE been translated now, and in at least one of the instances our work went toward the final product (Musashi).
Second off, here's the REAL and "official" story on Dragon Pervert... straight from the whore-se's mouth. Much like Joseph Joestar mentioned, this was a LONG time (and many, many drugs for me) ago, and thusly quite a bit of it's pretty foggy. That said, I think I can offer quite a bit of insight.
SKHP started in late '97 or early '98 sometime, during the initial wave of ROM hacking promulgated by AC2K and his "One-Stop ROM Hack Shop" or w/e it was called. I was 13 or 14 years old. My little brother ("Bomb") was 11 or 12. Keep this in mind when viewing Dragon Pervert: none of us knew shit about actual sex. One of the early hacks AC2K had done was called "Dragon Warrior XXX" -- and it is this hack that has often shown up as the "first" version of D.P. and has led to the confusion over his involvement, and the authorship in general.
Pretty shortly thereafter, I met DJW (later Gemma2k among other nicks) on irc. I could be wrong, but I don't think he was really a part of the "NES scene" so much as the "romhacking scene". At any rate, he was another young teenager who was interested in joining forces with the Spooky Kids. Most people who joined SKHP were from one of three categories (or some admixture of the three). They were either friends from real life (we'll throw my little brother in there, along with Figment, and EvilAmoeba); kids from the NES scene who I was friends with on IRC, etc (Monster_Turtle among others); or, established ROM hackers whose work and spirit was right in line with the group (Kasady, who took over the group after I left, Pachuka [unfortunately] and then later other guys including popehentai fit in there). *FOR THE RECORD, POPEHENTAI IS -NOT- PACHUKA*. DJW wasn't really like any of the other members. He had no real hacking experience, was not an established part of the NES'98 clique, and wasn't one of the kids I hung out with in real life. He really only worked on one hack ever (as a member of the Spooky Kids anyway), and I don't think most of the other members of SKHP really even knew him at all. What DJW was, was a kid with a big idea. ....
"Dragon Warrior XXX" was kinda funny and all, but what if we actually hacked EVERY SINGLE SPRITE, EVERY SINGLE ENEMY AND EVERY SINGLE BIT OF TEXT IN AN ENTIRE RPG? That was the goal, anyway. (www.badderhacks.net actually has a hilarious play-through review of Dragon Pervert which points out that somehow, some way, we entirely forgot to change the fucking DragonLord, but I digress -- and will return to this later.) I could be making this up entirely, but I seem to recall DJW contacting AC2k about Dragon Pervert, since it did take a few pages from the book of DWXXX -- but only a few. We were hoping to do something much more thorough, complete, and degenerate, however.
My brother and I began graphic work on D.P. (as the two of us, as a team, were mostly in charge of all the graphics in most of the early Spooky Kids hacks), and after we had completed about 9/10 of the monsters, the title screen, and all of the character sprites, we turned it over to DJW to work his magic with the text. This resulting "beta" version of Dragon Pervert is the "Dragon Pervert (Spooky Kids) (Older)" version of if you may see up on ROM sites.
However, as has remained typical in the ROM hacking community to this very day, we would always distribute our hacks as .ips patches on the Spooky Kids site. This seems to be the reason behind the countless different "versions" of Dragon Pervert and DWXXX floating around. At some point, it seems, someone actually applied the Dragon Pervert IPS patch over DWXXX, leading to ever more confusion -- to where, at present, the two hacks are more or less seen as "versions" of the same thing. I'll never forget how mad and confused I was when I opened up a copy of DWXXX to see what everyone was talking about and saw all of MY sprites and background modifications included there. But, I don't think AC2k had anything to do with that at all.
So, after releasing the initial patch things went on as normal. DJW was the type of guy who you wouldn't talk to for months and then would suddenly show up in IRC, and this one time he did that, he had "100% finished" Dragon Pervert (?!). Up the patch went, and ROM hacking history was made. The funny thing is, I had just played through DW1 on my NES that summer, and so I couldn't bring myself to do much playtesting. Apparently no one else who did the playtesting for us made it to the end of the game, either, since everyone reported back that, yes indeed, every single monster and bit of text was altered. How we completely forgot the main boss, regarding whom we had altered every single bit of text in the story, is beyond me. But I was 14, and by then beginning to experiment with drugs pretty heavily.
As Joseph Joestar said, D.P. really didn't make THAT much of a splash in the scene at the time. Don't get me wrong, people loved it and we were all VERY proud of the end result, but ALL of the hacks at that time were horrifically offensive and in awful taste. Dragon Pervert was just one of many. The one thing about D.P. that did make a bit of a splash in the ROM hacking community, and the thing I'm still proud of today, is that it was the first ROM hack (that I know of) with an altered title screen that wasn't complete shit. I actually had to find and alter a blank tile, and then use hex editor to construct the new title screen -- much like changing text, only waaaay more complex. I even edited the tiles of the little sparkle/glimmer thing to make it line up properly on the edited logo. Since then, no ROM hack worth its salt has been able to get away with leaving the title screen intact.
I think that's just about all I really have to say for this particular bit of history. I could go into WAY more detail on the beginnings of the ROM hacking scene in general, or the history of the Spooky Kids, or any number of things -- but that's beyond the scope of this particular thread. As for the NES'98 crowd... I kept in contact with phifey (Brett), OctoPooki (Tom Lowrie), and hayabusa (Tim McGruder) for years, but more or less lost touch with pretty much EVERYONE in the years right after highschool. I'd love to hear from anyone from back then, but especially any of those guys.
Feel free to ask any questions any of you may or may not have... I work a desk job these days so if there's one thing I've got, it's plenty of time to sit on my ass on the internet.
And long live NES'98!! Like seriously, I'm thinking about getting a tattoo.