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Rom Hacks
So there's a game you love very very much, you've mastered every aspect of it in and out. Yet you want to replay it but with a whole fresh set of eyes? Welcome to rom hacking! Where clever devs will tear apart a classic game and practically make an entirely new game out of it! In this section I'll highlight a few websites that aggregate huge lists of rom hacks for you to discover, then I'll highlight a few of top rated rom hacks out there, then finally I'd like to also mention randomizers as they fit in the same discussion.
One of the oldest rom hack websites still online. New hacks for hundreds of classic games are uploaded every day. Even has links to tools for making your own hacks for several games.
Not a hack host, but an online rom patcher. You just upload your game, then the patch file, and then you download the patched game! A necessary tool for many of these websites.
A younger website intended to be a spiritual successor to Romhacking.net
A collection of hacks for Super Mario 64. Even features special support for ParallelN64 to instantly launch a hack with one click.
A collection of Pokemon rom hacks for many games in the series. You can select your roms on the website and then download hacks pre-patched.
Rom hacks for retro Mario games, mostly Super Mario World
A handful of some of the most well regarded loved rom hacks of all time.
A Pokemon Fire Red hack featuring an entire new world and story to experience, a complete pokedex, and all sorts of new unique features to this hack. Practically an entire new unique Pokemon game.
A massive hack of Super Smash Bros. 64 featuring returning characters and stages from later Smash entries, and even a handful of brand new characters for this hack.
Of course you can't talk about Super Smash Bros. hacks without bringing up the most famous one. Project M is an overhaul hack of Super Smash Bros. Brawl that completely reworks the original game's controversial physics to be much more along the lines of Melee's mechanics. New costumes, new modes, stronger CPU players, and in Project+ an entire new character in Knuckles the Echidna. The original project would be shut down by Nintendo in a cease and desist order. However it lives on in the community maintained Project+ which is what I linked above. The final version of the original Project M can be found here.
A hack for Earthbound which features a completely new story and a much higher difficulty. This is a very punishingly challenging hack, although it does come with a .txt file describing a full walkthrough if you're having trouble. Despite the challenge, you'll find that the writing in this hack is extremely strong. It manages to do an excellent job retaining Earthbound's silly sense of humor in all of the casual dialogue. In the more serious dialogue you'll find a strong gripping story of an old man losing his sanity after the loss of his son. This hack would also go down in history for being created by Toby Fox of Undertale and Deltarune fame, and would also feature the first rendition of what would go down as one of the most iconic boss themes in video games. As it stands as its own product though, it's still very much worth playing if you're a huge fan of Earthbound.
A full length hack of Super Mario World featuring four worlds and 53 brand new levels and an absolutely lovely visual style.
A full length Super Mario 64 hack featuring tons of brand new levels and stars. A ton of aspects about Mario 64 were completely reprogrammed in Assembly to allow for all sorts of new power ups, gimmicks, enemies, and more!
So the full scale hacks that turn an old game into something new are incredible... but what if we want to scale things back a bit? What if I just want the same game's world but in a weird different order? Welcome to randomizers! It's a concept as simple as shuffling around all of the items in a game's world, and now suddenly it's a new experience that tests how well you a game's map from top to bottom. I'll highlight a couple particularly well made randomizers for some popular games. But afterward I'd also like to highlight something called Archipelago.
A Super Metroid randomizer featuring an incredible amount of customization for your runs. Starting locations, door rando, physics adjustments, anti softlock fixes, even down to telling the hack what tricks you're good at and not. (Great at bomb jumping, but just can't do a mock ball? This rando can account for that!) An incredibly impressive project and a shining example of customization in a randomizer.
A randomizer for The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Reformats the game's story to be much more open ended. You basically get dropped onto a random island in the ocean and now you're tasked with exploring the game's entire huge open world to find everything you need to defeat Ganon.
A fork of the classic Universal Pokemon Randomizer. Allows randomization capabilities for Pokemon games from Gen 1 all the way up to Gen 7.
A randomizer for Final Fantasy 6 that reformats the game to be much more open ended. Your goal is to find all the different characters and espers hiding across the game's massive world. It even has a built in tracker in the pause menu to keep track of what areas are accessible with the characters you obtained!
A randomizer for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time featuring a huge suite of options to customize your run nicely.
A crossover randomizer between Super Metroid and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Both games worlds are combined into one, as sometimes going through a door in Super Metroid will thrust you into the world of Hyrule. And entering a harmless house suddenly brings you into the depths of Norfair. Items for either game can be found anywhere in both worlds fully testing your knowledge of both classics at the same time.
Finally to cap off the randomizers discussion I'd like to bring up one of the coolest video game projects ever made. Archipelago is a "Multiworld Randomizer" where a group of players all playing their own randomized games all send each other different items across worlds! For example, someone playing Super Metroid can defeat Draygon, and then the item in the next room? Suddenly, the player in Ocarina of Time suddenly receives the mirror shield! It's an incredibly fun group activity I highly recommend if your group has fans for any of the supported games.
You can find the Archipelago Website here which will provide all the info you need to know. There's a list of officially supported games that let you create settings directly on the website. If you feel nothing on the supported games grabs your attention, check out the Archipelago Wiki's list which features a ton of "unsupported" games. These require additional steps for generating a multiworld, and you may have to join the Archipelago discord server to find instructions for the game you want to play.