What got you into rom hacking?

This doesn't necessarily have to be Z3 hacking just what got you into any rom hacking in general. It would also be interesting to know what keeps you guys rom hacking since it's definitely a huge venture with a lot of bumps.

For me personally I started just from the interest in making my own video game, however my programming knowledge is very limited and I really only know scripting so I could never make a video game. I started off by just editing castlevania trying to make it harder and eventually I found hyrule magic with no idea what I was getting myself into.  

For what keeps me rom hacking? It's a little odd since zelda 3 editing can be very stressful especially without backups. I like to listen to lets plays of some of the rom hacks you guys made like parallel worlds and goddess of wisdom in the background for some reason, I always have. The idea of having a zelda game and feeling that sense of accomplishment in the end is what I'm shooting for.

In my case it was the fact, that the best SNES games like Z3, SMW and Super Metroid never had a sequel. I was even tricked once, that the sequel of Alttp was released in the 90's. I think it just jumped into N64 and the 3D environment to soon.
 
So now when there was a chance to actually make it on your own, I've decided to try it and made a Improvement hack of the original Alttp called PDude's Quest, and then wanted to finish up Shards of Might (took me 2 years to change it into Goddess of Wisdom).
 
When I first heard of Parallel Worlds (brand new game similar to Alttp), I was thrilled. The difficulty never bothered me really. I still consider PW as the first sequel to Alttp (a very old wish come true). After 3 months I've finished both quests on 100 percent. PW also got me into modding Z3.

For me, romhacking is one of the most interesting things a human can do. It combines many difficult things, programming, reverse engineering, knowledge on how a processor works and so on. And i like difficult things that only a few people have the benefits to make. And making video games is for sure the most amazing thing :-)

For me, A few things:
1. zeldac
2. how there wasn't any zelda 1 dungeon editors
3. frustratingly annoyingly not working Game genie codes.

I first started with zelda 1, but the game became too restrictive to work with (or should i say, GameMakr24 used up all the tricks the game could do)

I took a look at hyrule magic and some of the zelda 3 hacks out there (i think iced hyrule is the only one which is around, plus a lot of projects people worked on) and said to myself - i can do better than that, i came up with a theme - the puzzles in the tower, the rest of the game is to work around that to make it work.

I don't really remember all the details, but I was in college and was reading a lot of Greek tragedies (plays). I thought a number of them would be cool to be presented in a canned up scripted engine and with a similar look to Final Fantasy VI on the SNES.

But I didn't know the first thing of how SNES games were coded so I started taking apart Zelda 3 as a learning project. I started by modifying random bits (not bytes) of the Zelda 3 rom and seeing what happened. When that had some rather chaotic results I decided to look at sram file hacking to see if I could get a better idea of what the game was doing, and that paid some good dividends. When I got some good results out of that I started to be interested in learning assembly. I started off creating small programs in x86 machine code (in hex!) because I thought it would be easiest but soon got bored with that. I surmised that the actual SNES (65816) assembly might be more fun to work with. At that point I began deciphering what I could of the Zelda 3 rom and it was tough at first because debuggers were practically nonexistent back then.

It's funny, I never even worked one minute on the original project. The play in particular I most wanted to render was Medea by Euripides. These weren't even meant to be games but 'movies' of plays.