A Little Love Letter to ROMs (Patreon)

Pokemon Liquid Crystal is a ROM that has been in development since 2007. It has been being developed by a 4 person team, known online as: Linkandzelda, Zeikku, Jambo51 and Magnius. In this video I’d like to talk about why Pokemon Liquid Crystal is completely amazing. First though, ROMs:

A ROM is the colloquial term for a port of a console game, usually gameboy specifically. The name ROM comes from the Read-Only Memory chip in a game cartridge that the data needs to be copied from to create a port of the game. Who is it that copies the data you may be asking, and the answer is, fans of the game. Someone who wants to play the game from their childhood but doesn’t have access to their console any more perhaps, or maybe someone who wants to mod their nostalgic fave in some way.
For example, most ROM emulators include fast-forward settings, which are honestly absurdly useful, because… do you know how slow Pokemon is? If you haven’t played it fast-forwarded, you don’t know how slow Pokemon is.

Artists need to get paid, just like everyone else - thanks capitalism - but when art is considered essential or “part of the canon” efforts are made to make that art freely available to everyone. This is covered quite well in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. Some such methods of making art free is taking and distributing images of art, for example the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa is considered so seminal that everyone needs to know what it looks like, because how are we going to have conversations about art if we don’t know what the Mona Lisa looks like?

Clearly there is an assumption that important art should be freely accessible to all.
Console games especially, which have a huge financial barrier to entry, have repeatedly become culturally ubiquitous points of reference, but how are my filthy broke comrades and I supposed to experience Muscular Murder Man XL only on Nintendo DS if we can’t afford the Nintendo DS?

The answer ROMs provide is that old games should be free to everyone. Old games, by the way, that are largely discontinued and don’t make any new money for the people who make them. Lots of art debuts in a setting that costs money to access, but then if the work is considered culturally essential, effort is made to make it available to everyone. Video games debut in a setting that costs money to access, but then, if they come to be considered essential, efforts are made to make them available to everyone for free. The difference with games is, all it takes is one person. If just one person loves a game enough, they can make a ROM of it, and it will be saved forever.

Maybe, if they love the game enough, they’ll want to not just copy it, but update it, try to improve it, give it modern graphics and more content - and so we come back around to Pokemon Liquid Crystal.
There are some media I choose to go over again and again and again. I’ve talked before about how I’ll just play Shadow of the Colossus until my eyes fall out. I saw Hail Caesar three times while it was still in the cinema. When I moved to university and I felt a bit homesick one of the things I did was get ROMs of old games on my phone.

Pokemon Liquid Crystal is a hack ROM, meaning it isn’t just a copy of a game. Instead it uses the more modern graphics of Pokemon: Fire Red in the setting of Pokemon: Crystal. There is a pretty solid divide among Pokemon fans regarding which generation was the total downfall of Pokemon, but the fans who are… um… right, say that no Pokemon after generation 1 and 2 are even slightly acceptable. 

Pokemon Liquid Crystal is therefore the perfect experience for Pokemon fans who are feeling homesick and nostalgic, and don’t want to play any of the newer, inferior games. You start in the second gen Johto region, and if you play through the Johto League you get to travel on and face the Gym Leaders and Elite 4 of the gen 1 Kanto region.
If you beat the Kanto Region, then the Liquid Crystal devs have added more content. They started working on a new area called the Orange Islands, with totally new maps, characters, dialogue and plot. 

The thing about playing a game that you love over and over is, you aren’t always doing it for healthy reasons. That was certainly true for me in university, I’d install Liquid Crystal when I was bored and start playing it and feel really excited about it, and after a time it would be distracting me too much from work and I’d have to take the radical option and uninstall it rather than just have the willpower to stop playing. I repeated this pattern several times, always as a method of procrastination and never making it further than the Kanto region Elite 4. I only recently reinstalled it and actually played all the way to the Orange Islands.

I started this new adventure. For the first time in maybe a decade I was going to try out a new story set in the best era of Pokemon… but then I got into the story of the Orange Islands a little way, and I found that I couldn’t progress. The game hadn’t been finished. All this time I’d been playing a ROM that had been more or less abandoned, and I could play as far as the half-completed maps that the developers left behind, and no further.
At first, this was a little heartbreaking. Then it felt ironic: something I’d been using to not get things done had never been finished. But then, it dawned on me that I shouldn’t be sad that it hadn’t been finished, I should be happy that linkandzelda, zeikku and the others had loved Pokemon so much in the first place that they’d made this game that I’d had hours of fun playing.

Video games as an art form, most of the time only get experienced by the audience once completed. ROMs on the other hand...

When you play a ROM you get to see the development in progress in such a way that the development becomes part of the art piece. You can play up to the exact pixel that the developers stopped working on it. When so many ROMs are fan-made copies or hacks of popular games, this means that not only the development but also the fandom becomes part of the game. When you can see where the developer stopped working, you can see all the time that they put into and you know that they kept going for all that time because they loved the original.

The developer had time to work on it because it was feasible in their life and then it became infeasible. Maybe they started another project, maybe something happened in their family, maybe they just had bills to pay.

ROMs bring console games - an exclusionary approach to games - onto universal devices like phones and computers. In that way, they make games more accessible across socioeconomic strata. They make games as an artform more available to everyone, and they exist because of the unpaid effort that people put in, because they loved those games.