The Link to the Past randomizer can change not only the contents of chests and rewards in the game, but also the character’s sprite, created enemies and the color palette of the world!
Passing your favorite childhood game is like meeting an old friend. You feel relieved to know what is in the chest, what bush the enemy will jump out of, what secret tactics make it easy to defeat the enemy. Such a soothing close bond becomes an obvious choice when you want to relax in the game.
But what if you add a little pepper to a familiar gameplay? After passing the game several times and remembering it, how can we return the feeling of adventure and research that we experienced during the first passage? A small but actively developing community of retro-game emulation scenes is looking for an answer to this question through the use of mods and hacks called “randomisers”.
Someone says perfection cannot be improved. But a mod for Final Fantasy VI called Beyond Chaos proves that this is possible. In it, Yoshi became the new King of Figaro, and Master Chief turned out to be his twin brother.
Using the popular Universal Pokemon Randomizer, you can turn Beadril into an initial Pokémon that knows the attack of the ghost-type Pokémon Steel Wing.
Thanks to the power of the randomizer, Kent from Fire Emblem for GBA can now fulfill his secret dream and become a bard instead of a knight!
Shuffle the deck and hand over
In the simplest case, the mod randomizers simply mix the data in the game ROM so that each passage becomes a new and unpredictable experience. So, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past randomizer can change items found in chests, modify rewards received for dungeon quests, and even replace Link sprite with one of the many options created by fans (I personally like the sprite from Mega Man X ). And you can go even further - change the exit points from various game doors or even scatter keys to the bosses of a certain dungeon around the world (rather than put them in the dungeon itself)!
What emerged as a small niche has now evolved into a separate genre of retrogaming. The website “BIG list of video game randomizers” , created in 2016, today presents hundreds of mods for randomizing games, ranging from Metroid Prime, Golden Sun and Earthbound to Faxanadu, Adventure Island and Doom . The list is replenished weekly with new items, and if your favorite game is not in it, perhaps it will appear soon.
Different randomization modes provide different levels of randomization, but the most standard is the idea of mixing things or detectable skills / abilities. Some mods retain the conceived structure of the game, but change the rewards and items found along the way. Others completely modify the way the game progresses.
Two games at the same time
The most extreme randomisers are designed in such a way that a player must complete two games in one run. In the Super Metroid x Link to the Past Randomizer mod, the player uses special randomized doors to move between the worlds of Hyrul and Zebes, and collecting items in one helps the passage in the other. There is a very high probability that Uncle Link will give the player high jump boots, which will then allow Samus to reach the sword somewhere in the depths of Norfair.
Randomizers add an almost endless replay value to boring games - in each passage, players must overcome new obstacles. They test the skill and knowledge of the game, and not just use muscle memory, trained for many years. Limiting the player’s ability to rely on their "autopilot", the mods return him to his original tasks: quick adaptation and problem solving.
However, a deep knowledge of the base game is still useful in the randomizer, although it only helps to understand what new opportunities open up when finding each item. You may have to fight against a difficult enemy, having more scarce resources than usual. Or you may need to keep alive a member of the group with a special skill that can barely survive one blow of the enemy.
Even if you only have vague memories of the classic game, there are many resources and guides that can help you. These can be beginners' guides on basic strategies for passing a randomizer or full-blown trackers showing which areas become available when new items are received.
I like to watch
The first time I came across a community of fans of random games of retro games a couple of years ago, when I saw on Twitch the stream The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past ( LttP ), which at first I hardly recognized. There was a character in her, not like Link, finding objects in chests in which they should not be. A Google search explained to me what was going on and sparked my interest in this strange new world of fresh retro gameplay. Since then, I have tried randomizers for many games of the Castlevania , Super Metroid , Fire Emblem , Ocarina of Time and Final Fantasy series ( 4 , 5 , 6 ). With each new mod, I sank deeper into the rabbit hole of randomisers.
When I started talking with other people interested in the randomization scene, it turned out that many people learned about it through Twitch. Some found this concept due to random searches on the Internet, but in the last couple of years, most have come to the community after watching live streams. They watched little-known streamers, and large-scale charity stream events like Awesome Games Done Quick , RPG Limit Break, and the recent Speedran Quest Quest For Glory 3 . And due to the fact that the LttP and Mario 64 randomisers appeared in the Awesome Games Done Quick 2020 schedule, a completely new group of spectators will get acquainted with these mods.
One of the most popular randomizer streams today is the fantastic “Free Enterprise” for Final Fantasy IV . Starting with two random characters, an item and an aircraft, you embark on a treasure hunt in the open world to discover the items needed to fly to the moon and defeat Zeromus!
The October SpeedGaming Live event proved that passing randomisers has a potential future as an e-sports.
Daily walkthroughs " Link to the Past Rando" is a well-known event on several SpeedGaming Twitch channels that is watched by hundreds of people.
Some of the most popular randomisers, including Super Metroid, Zelda, and the open-world Final Fantasy IV randomizer, have gained popularity mainly due to the speedrunner community. One such randomizer was Final Fantasy IV: Free Enterprise . The Free Enterprise mod, first released in 2018, allows players to break out of the strict narrative structure of the original game and take part in an open-world treasure hunt in search of items that ultimately send them to the last boss of the game. A month after the release of the mod, there were more users on the Free Enterprise Discord server than on the server dedicated to the speedran of the original Final Fantasy IV . A year after its release, the game appeared at Awesome Games Done Quick 2019 , the largest charity video game event in the world.
Tournaments and competitions have become familiar to the randomizer community, large events are held by many organizers, including Challonge, SpeedRunsLive and SpeedGaming. In the fall of 2017, the organizers of the LttP Rando tournament found that the demand for their event was much higher than they expected. After filling the initial limit of 100 participants, they had to organize an additional tournament for 150 people. By the spring of 2018, there were already 512 registered players in the same tournament, and if the software allowed, they would probably be more.
Today, if you go to SpeedRunsLive at any time, you will most likely see several randomizer competitions, and the largest LttP Randomizer tournaments organized by the site attract more than 100 players. Daily competitions in LttP consistently attract hundreds of spectators to SpeedGaming , and the annual SpeedGaming Live event, in which randomizer tournaments first appeared in October , had a prize pool of $ 3,000.
These numbers will not scare eSports monsters like Fortnite or League of Legends , but at least they show the possibility that one day this concept will grow from a niche to a profitable mass sport.
But even if you do not take into account the number of viewers, everyone - players, developers, event organizers - agree that this developing class of mods has breathed new life into familiar old games. The ability to replay old games and get a new adventure every time recreates the feeling of wonder and research that arose when you first inserted a cartridge or disk into the console.
Nostalgia is a powerful thing, and although randomizers will never completely replace the sensations of our favorite games, they are able to open them again and again from new angles.
I express special thanks to the participants of the communities SpeedGaming, RPG Limit Break, Free Enterprise and LttP Rando, who answered my questions and shared their experience.