EarthBound - Halloween Hack ROM

EarthBound Halloween Hack, or Radiation’s Halloween Hack, also sometimes known as Press the B Button, Stupid! is a romhack of EarthBound made by Toby Fox and was developed when he was a teenager. The romhack was released in 2008 for starmen.net’s Halloween Funfest. It was inspired by the Brandish series, where the hack’s protagonist, Varik comes from. It is much shorter than the original EarthBound. As the game is a romhack it is playable on SNES emulators and the official SNES consoles.

The hack takes place in an alternate timeline of EarthBound, where Ness doesn’t return to Onett after the defeat of Giygas. The hack starts in Twoson, where a bounty hunter Varik wakes up inside of Ness’s house until he hears a voice tell him to wake up and that he’ll call the cops (implying that Varik was drunk). After waking up inside of a building hosting the Sexy Sisters (formerly owned by the Runaway Five), a man reminds him that the ex-mayor of Onett, B.H. Pirkle, wants to talk to him in the manager room about an important issue.

There, B.H Pirkle tells Varik that everybody is flocking over to the show place to just see him and then informs Varik that a monster who went inside a house and violently killed a young girl’s parents. Pirkle attempts to guilt trip Varik to investigate where the monster is and kill it for the sake of Twoson. Varik is then granted the key to the Sewers from the ex-mayor, along with the promise that once his mission is done, he’ll be elected mayor. His mission begins by going into the Sewers; the manhole used to access them isn’t locked, effectively nullifying the need for the Key.