#nhmftdn

[goldengun13]

The NHM-iverse

This is, essentially, an excerpt of the history of BHDN - a little series of anecdotes regarding my involvement with Kyo and his creation of the NHM series of hacks.  My involvement was fairly minor, so don’t think I’m trying to take credit for his masterpiece; however, it has been one of the most interesting episodes in my time with BHDN.

It all started very close to the beginning, on the original Bad Hacks Dot Net around 2008 or so.  The site’s original owner (name redacted), who had seen many an offensive hack, was completely blown away by the content of NHMFTDN.  The original hack was of the Super Mario Bros 1 & Duck Hunt ROM, so finding a file to patch the .ips to was a little bit of a hassle, but completely worth it.

I was a big fan of the original hack when it came out.  Expressing my awe, I ended up emailing Kyo directly.  He turned out to be the coolest, most easy-going guy, in stark contrast to the contents of the hack.  That’s something that I would come to find out more and more as I spent time on BHDN - that the hackers themselves would always have personalities at direct odds with the bizarre or offensive nature of their hacks.  

It was around this time that Kyo revealed that he was working on a new hack, a sequel to NHM, based on Super Mario Bros 2.  He was looking for playtesters at the time, and offered to send me the beta ROM to try out.  I leapt at the chance to try out the latest game before release, and I ended up playing more of it than I ever had of SMB2.  

I gave Kyo some feedback on the hack, as well as some questions about the characters.  I suggested that the weird, robot-looking outline character be given some sort of contrasting color, as the outline was hard to see when in the mirror-verse areas of the game.  Kyo told me that this character was actually “Crazy Grama,” a character he’d created in childhood who existed in a world of incredibly violent kids’ doodles, killing nazis and terrorists with thanks and planes and machine guns.  

For my efforts, Kyo immortalized me by adding several hidden “golden guns” throughout NHM2.  The easiest one to see is hidden in the curtain on the character select screen.  

This was the beginning of a long-lasting friendship that continues to this day.  Kyo has released plenty more hacks since then; and while I haven’t always had a chance to do any play testing, I’ve continued to offer my support never I can.

Now, after NHMFTDN2, Kyo began plans for the third installment of the series.  Knowing Kyo, he had to chose something big.  Instead of the logical choice of hacking SMB3, or even SMW, Kyo jumped two consoles forward and proclaimed that he would be hacking SMB64!  This was an incredible thing to hear, since up until that point anything but NES or SNES hacking was virtually unheard of.  But, true to his word, Kyo began to produce a few alpha builds here and there.  I can’t even remember how many builds he created, then started fresh from scratch (mostly due to hard drive or computer failures), but it was at least two or three.

In this interim time, roughly between 2010 and 2013, I began to discus the NHM-verse with Kyo: Who were the major players, and what were their motivations?  What would the plot of NHM64 be?  Who was the villain?  He offered me a few tantalizing details, essentially all he had come up with at that point.  I offered to write some ideas for him, to which he happily accepted.

I began to brainstorm answers to the biggest questions I had about the NHM series.  Who were the Dick Nazis?  Where did the come from?  What was their motivation to conquer new worlds?  Who was their leader, after HD was kicked out?  I began to sketch a rough outline of ideas.  The Dick Nazis were actual nazis who escaped from Earth in 1945 shortly before the defeat of the Third Reich by use of advanced, experimental portal technology.  Hitler’s Dick himself was to be an actual clone of the real Adolf Hitler - albeit an imperfect one.  My central character who helped pull all of this together was Ilsa Analverker - a female nazi scientist who created the Hitler clone and who designed the portal technology.

I was inspired by old exploitation movies like “Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS,” as well as the crazed nazi experiments in the PS2 game Bloodrayne.  I’d read several articles about German “wunderwaffe,” experimental wonder weapons that were supposed to turn the tide of war in their favor; this also inspired some of my ideas for nazi tech and experiments.  I wrote Ilsa as being pragmatic, resourceful, dedicated, and utterly bloodthirsty when needed.  

The idea for the Hitler clone was based around the old song “Hitler Has Only Got One Ball,” a British WWII song created to make fun of the nazis.  But, in doing further digging, I found that it was actually quite plausible that Hitler really did have only one testicle, following a groin injury he sustained during the Battle of the Somme in the Great War.  Indeed, the Soviet autopsy of der Fuehrer’s remains could only find one testicle!  This gave me the idea that Ilsa would mound a state-sanctioned expedition to France in 1941 to recover the missing gonad, in hopes of using it for a cloning project.  After all, Hitler was surely paranoid about attempts on his life, so having a biological clone would give some extra life insurance to both him and the Reich.  (Reichinsurance?)  

The idea was that, much like some modern cloning techniques where a single cell from an organ can be used to grow a whole replacement organ, Hitler’s missing gonad could be used to grow an entire replacement Hitler.  An outlandish idea to be sure, but the nazis were crazy for outlandish ideas.  Searches for ancient artifacts of power really did occur, and they even enlisted the help of occult masters and alchemists to try to bolster their empire.  So, in my concept, Ilsa would recover Hitler’s missing testicle (remarkably intact after over 20 years) and use it to attempt to grow a second Fuehrer.  However, being the first human clone, there were some... side effects.  The genitalia were a perfect clone, but the body itself... instead of being a human form, it more closely resembled humanoid genitalia with a face.  Oops...

It was around this point in the backstory concept that the Germans started to lose the war.  Fearing the worst, the real Fuhrer ordered Ilsa’s military and scientific force, dubbed the “Hodeninvasion” (rough German for “testicle invasion force) to mobilize to safety.  Ilsa’s side project, a long-range portal, was activated, and the Hodenvasion forces fled to a world on a far side of the universe.

Don’t think that I forgot to add any intrigue or dark moments to the story.  I came up with the idea that Analverker became strangely attracted to the Hitler clone, to the point that they were romantically involved.  I suppose that devotion to one’s Fuehrer knows no limit.  Based on real life-cases of German use of slave labor, I figured that the Hodenvasion base and portal would have been built by concentration camp laborers in deplorable conditions.  

As for what would eventually become the Dick Nazi homeworld, I had the idea that portal scouts had somehow found an exact duplicate of Earth somewhere else in the universe.  The same continents, maybe even the same vegetation and animals, but not humans for whatever reason.  This would surely be the best option for escaping nazis to flee to - even better than Argentina!  

But of course, a new world needs buildings, infrastructure, and all the benefits of a civilization in the midst of the industrial revolution.  While all the scientists can bring plans and designs and schematics for factories and buildings, you need labor to actually create all those things.  So, as you could imagine, the Hodenvasion/ Dick Nazis conscript Jewish concentration camp prisoners to build their new empire on the other side of the portal.  As awful as this would be, I intended it to have quite a bit of irony: Even in their new “aryan” paradise, they could not be free of those they considered to be “untermench.”  

Now, as for how the human Hodenvasion became dick nazis, I didn’t have anything that clear, but part of it all came back to Ilsa.  Being a scientist, I figured she’d have a bit of the Mengele in her, creating biological monstrosities in the pursuit of perfection.  The portal tech itself could have a bad effect, resulting in mutations.  And the new Earth could also have some detrimental effect to human life.  But, I think that perhaps the best idea I had was that the degeneration of the Dick Nazis/ Hodenvasion was self-inflicted.  That their lives became hedonistic, depraved, and inhuman, and that this lifestyle manifested itself physically like a role-reversed Portrait of Dorian Grey.  

There’s more to the story than just that, but this post has already gone on for way longer than I thought it would.  I’ll continue these tales next time!