After two years of work, a group of EarthBound ROM hackers has released something truly special for fans of the Toby Fox-developed indie game Deltarune: a recreation of the game's first chapter inside the SNES RPG.
Bound to the Dark World had been developed in secrecy over the last couple of years, but was finally unveiled on social media two days before Halloween, on October 29th, by one of its lead creators, Chromadeline.
In this announcement, Chromadeline shared the very first public trailer for the project, demonstrating some of the incredible work that had been done behind the scenes, while also encouraging players to check out the hack with the prospect of experiencing Deltarune "as if it were made in the '90s".
Two days later, the hack was then launched on Halloween, with the hack being available to download for free from itch.io (though you will obviously need to provide your own ROM of Earthbound).
Of course, if you have any knowledge of Toby Fox's game development background, you'll know that, before making a name for himself with hugely successful RPG titles like Undertale and its episodic follow-up Deltarune, Fox was actually an Earthbound ROM hacker himself, having notably produced a Halloween Hack of the game back in 2008. As a result, it seems pretty fitting for fans of Earthbound to recreate one of Fox's games in this manner, with it being the perfect way to pay homage to the developer's ROM hacking past.
Here's the full list of names who helped bring this amazing hack to life:
- Chromadeline
- Isaiah_Mark
- CoolMikeHaha
- Nes_Cade
- felix.rodent
- Atlantixa
- NOLI_KISSES
- …and the rest of the PK Hack community!
You can grab it here if you want to give it a try.