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Otherwise known as “Press the B Button, Stupid!” Or “Radiation’s Earthbound Halloween Hack”, the Earthbound Halloween Hack is a ROM hack of Earthbound made by Toby Fox in 2008 for the Starmen.Net Halloween Funfest. The hack tells the story of an alternate timeline where Ness, Paula, Jeff, and Poo never returned from the past after defeating Giygas. Instead of Ness, the player assumes the role of a bounty hunter named Varik (of Brandish fame) getting hired by the mayor of Twoson to track down a monster who mutilated a little girl’s parents. Varik finds out that Dr. Andonuts, Jeff’s father from the original Earthbound, is the creator of the monsters that have been killing people. Varik goes inside Andonuts’ magicant and teams up with Ness’s 3 party members mentioned above. Together they kill Andonuts. The Halloween Hack is most well known for being the first game to host the debut of Megalovania, as well as being a precursor to Toby Fox’s later games, Undertale and Deltarune. Toby looks down on the hack as “A bad ROM hack with swears” and doesn’t bring it up in conversation in modern day. This is due to the original version including the f slur in the final boss dialogue before it was removed in the censored version.
“Did you know that before Toby made Undertale, he made Earthbound Halloween Hack?”
“Oh yeah, that edgy ROM hack with swears?”
Earthbound Halloween Hack is a game (an earthbound hack) created by Toby "Radiation" Fox using the program PK hack in 2009 for a Starmen.net's Halloween Funfest. Its protagonist, Varik, comes from another game called Brandish. In short, Varik is given a mission to hunt down the moster that killed the girl's parents during night. The hack is overwhelmingly hard and requires a lot of grinding, and Toby himself is not fond of it. In his deleted twitter post, he called it a "Bad romhack with swears" and asked to not bring it up.
I myself would highly recommend everyone to play it, as this is an opportunity to see how greatly Toby advanced as a writer, compositor and game developer since then.
"Do you know about Earthbound Halloween hack?"
"The one that has Megalovania in it?"
"..."
"I'm gonna play Earthbound halloween hack"
1 hour later
"I grinded to level 6 and I still can't beat ANYONE! Why is it so hard?!"
He didn't know he forgot to equip the sword and the armor, as he never played earthbound before.