Does anyone remember Challenge Games?
When I first got into emulation at the beginning of the decade (ugh, I can feel the crow's feet forming in saying that), one of the first sites I stumbled across on my bumbling, fumbling search was a cabal of classic ROM hackers who went by "Challenge Games." As I explored their site and their projects more deeply, I developed an enormous number of questions, which these gentlemen were very kind to answer on their site's forum.
Two projects that stand out in my mind (though I did not try them all) are The Legend of Zelda: Outlands, which can be found at various reproduction websites, and the then-yet unfinished Final Fantasy Zero, an extraordinarily difficult (at least in the beta testing) hack of FF1 that threw Heal-capable monsters and other such challenges at the player right from the beginning and was utterly relentless in its assault on the party. The patch could still be found at Zophar's Domain, the last I looked.
Well, after many years of absence, I decided to search for these fellows again, having long since lost the URL to the capricious winds of binary. Sadly, after scouring Google searches and other engines, it appears that the gang of wonderfully helpful and enviably patient has disbanded, likely taking many of the fruits of their labor with them.
Does anyone know when Challenge Games' demise may have happened? What prompted it? Are other projects of theirs recoverable, or are they essentially scattered and lost forever? It seems a darn shame, but all good things must come to an end...
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