Picture this:

It’s 20xx, old games are getting harder to find, and the prices are skyrocketing. One day a friend says to you “You know you can get that for free, right?” They go on to explain this odd new thing called an “Emulator.” A few hours later your computer is being eaten alive by all the viruses you’ve just installed, but it doesn’t matter. You have a free copy of Pokemon.

It was always Pokemon too. If ever there was a game worth downloading: that was it. By the time emulators picked up the internal batteries of the first 3 generations of games were starting to run out. This meant that you were liable to lose your progress if you didn’t gut the cartridge and replace the battery before playing at all. Most people were not up for that.

What a lot of people also weren’t up for was the price. Pokemon games have always held their value pretty well, so the cheapest they ever get is around $15 in questionable condition. Most people I knew didn’t bother trying to buy the other titles, they just emulated them. Why wouldn’t you?

Once you knew what to look for, getting ROMs of old titles was easy and (mostly) risk free. Everyone started with Pokemon, that is just what you did. But once you knew what to do there was a world of games available to you. Plus this was a lot of people’s first experience to ROM hacks.

ROM hacks were weird. The most notable ones were for, as you might expect, Pokemon. New stories, new maps, parodies, randomizers. ROM hacks made up entire new games for free! It was unlike anything you see anymore. Of course this is because of how defensive the company clad in red is over their copyright. A few years ago most Pokemon ROMs were sandblasted off the internet before the release of a game most people don’t care about anymore.

Then again the company in question was technically in the right when they angered a massive chunk of their target audience for no profit. After all, distribution of ROMs is technically illegal. As a responsible adult I cannot advocate for such activity. So I’m going to tell you exactly what to look for so you don’t accidentally download any of these nasty files.

Whatever you do, do not go on a website such as emuparadise.me for reliable and safe access to emulators and ROMs. Especially make sure that you avoid any ROMs marked with “(trashman)”, these are exceptionally good quality and should be avoided at all costs. Finally, if you are ever in doubt on how to avoid these heinous files, there are plenty of forums and Sub-Reddits that tell you where to find ROMs. So you can avoid them, obviously.

At some point this blog became focused on Pokemon ROMs in particular. As I mentioned earlier there is a world of games out there if you look around (not that I would recommend doing so). There are also a ton of amazing ROM hacks for other games that I haven’t covered. But I suppose that is a blog for another time.

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