HyperBound

HyperBound is a hack/mod for the Super NES game EarthBound. To play it using an emulator, you must acquire a ROM image of EarthBound and apply the IPS file as a patch.

I created HyperBound as an undergraduate student at Toronto Metropolitan University. The hack follows the trials and tribulations of an unnamed amnesiac, who is thrust into a world that is completely unknown to him. Using a variety of hacking tools and an old Super NES game as its basis, HyperBound explores ideas associated with videogames such as non-linear narratives and spatial storytelling.

The hack uses glitches as a metaphor for the deterioration of memory, with one of the central trials of the game’s story takes place inside the protagonist’s mind. Failing this challenge causes the game world to crumble in a videogame-like way: garbage blocks muck up the screen, dialogue becomes scrambled, and some of the hack’s content can even become completely inaccessible.

HyperBound was featured in Auntie Pixelante’s book, Rise of the Video Game Zinesters. The three page write-up focuses on how the existing structure of a video game can be co-opted to create a new narrative (excerpt below):

HyperBound takes its name from “hypertext,” text that’s arranged in a nonlinear structure. (This book is a text: it’s arranged to be read from start to finish, one page to the next. A website, where you might click on a word to “link” to a page about that subject, is hypertext.)

What better model for the nonlinear exploration of text than the space of a digital game, where the player moves around the world by moving her character across the screen, encountering characters, and listening to what they have to say? That’s the part of the design of EarthBound that HyperBound has lifted. What it’s rejected is the fighting. The hack is purely about exploring the world and discovering the text, and original script written by Iantorno and his brother.

Since its completion, HyperBound has been distributed and displayed in a variety of ways. Its first public exhibition took place at the 2007 Axis New Media Festival, where it met enthusiastic reviews from both students and faculty. Later on that year, it was granted a larger installation space at Toronto Metropolitan University for the second annual Toronto Nuit Blanche Festival. During the course of the evening, hundreds of attendees stopped by to play the game on four available consoles. After its festival run, HyperBound found a second life as an online game, with tens of thousands of downloads.

In recent years, after discovering numerous bootleg versions of HyperBound circulating on eBay and AliExpress, I have used the hack as a lens to study the production and distribution of reproduction cartridges. I have created numerous physical versions of HyperBound using both hobbyist boards and donor cartridges (all of which are playable on original hardware), marking an unexpected return-to-form for the game.