You may not be able to teach an old dog, new tricks, but you most certainly can give it a haircut. Before gaming remasters were the most prominent marketing ploy, a dedicated community of individuals sought to breathe new life into older games.

For some, there were RomHacks to add new designs, dungeons, characters, etc; the key here being 2D Games on older hardware. What about 3D games? PC native games have had mod support for years, with new game modes, music, scenarios, etc. This is all well and good, but console games were still more difficult to mod (at the time).

During the active development of several N64 emulators, their game to be a newer driver for processing the 3D and 2D assets for that console’s Roms. The loading times were better, and processing was very efficient, but the most intriguing feature was the ability to load external files into the memory of the game itself.

3D games rely on two huge key systems to work in producing the imagery you see in-game: Polygons, and Textures.

Polygons here refer to 3 Dimensional objects made with multiple polygonal shapes connected to form objects. If you played a game using only polygons, you may be able to see the shapes in wireframe mode, but there will be no images on any of the faces.

Textures: Images that are placed upon polygons to provide some semblance of familiarity (Faces, hair, hands, clothing, Leaves, Grass, Water, etc.)

With both aspects together, you see the 3D shapes, and you see what you would expect to see there. Imagine a blank T-Shirt and an Iron-on decal. The shirt is the “polygon” and the decal is the “texture.”

After seeing the previously mentioned video on Ocarina of Time, featuring the Retexture Project, I immediately began searching for somewhere that might have access to these projects.

My search led me to a site called: Emutalk.net

This site would become one of my regular haunts over the course of the next year or so (and off and on from that time forward). Here I’d meet some intriguing individuals such as XenoBond, Djipi, Zeth Alkar, and many more.

These individuals also loved N64 games and believed that they could “revive” the magic with higher fidelity images. Djipi took a bold route, instead of High-Resolution textures that many were working on, he instead set out to adapt the “Legend of Zelda The Wind Waker” designs, cel-shading and all. (He would later work on HD packs based on the OOT and MM Remakes from 3DS)

Many of these projects would be run through the emulator “Project 64” which was also my emulator of choice.

I would be obsessed with this for quite a long time, spending hours blending new and improved releases of texture packs with my personal preferences for styles. I thought that the sky was the limit for these projects, before moving on there were even some preliminary attempts to load external media such as new models and inject those into the game as well. (Of course, now that OOT has been natively ported to PC, we can see perhaps where we may go from here.)

What drew my attention away was a reappearance of a particular kind of software that would fundamentally change how I looked at video games.

I love Kingdom Hearts! From the first trailer, I saw on Disney Channel, to the very day I flipped my brand new PS2 ass over teakettle out of sheer elation, to now the near-shrine I have from my collection of games.

I could spend all day waxing poetic about how much I love KH, but it was one video about Kingdom Hearts that caused 2 distinctly different events to occur (with some time in-between).

In Kingdom Hearts 2 there is a secret boss available to fight, the infamous Sephiroth from the FFVII Compilation and “Re” series of games. In this particular fight, you play as the primary Protagonist “Sora” and you have to fight alone against this deadly foe.

The battle contrasts greatly with the others in the game. In the standard gameplay loop, Sora is joined by teammates Donald, and Goofy. (Yes, the Disney Characters). So imagine my surprise when I see a video claiming to show a player using Mickey Mouse with Donald and Goofy as his partners.

I clicked with much skepticism and summarily had my jaw dropped to the floor. It was real, I saw it actually occurring, and my eyes were not deceived. Someone had managed to pull this off, and all I could ask is: HOW?

The comments section quickly answered “Gameshark” and “Action Replay”, and I immediately began searching for this proverbial white whale, or shark rather.

The Action Replay Max for PS2 would serve to be the single most incredible tool in my arsenal, but I was nowhere NEAR the point of understanding what I had. That realization would not come until I was in high school, for now, I had a new way to explore the medium of video games… and I’ll tell you how… NEXT TIME

Coming up: Action Replay Rewind… and how a pair of Tweezers allowed what Nintendidn’t.