Double Jump Gaming News

Creator Spotlight: Mayro and the World of ROM-hacks

Article by: Victor Anderson

September’s Creator Spotlight will focus on Mayro. Mayro is a streamer and modder from Wales who gets her gamer handle from a memed misspelling of Mario’s name. This makes sense, as most of her content revolves around hacked nintendo games, both the making of them and reviewing the creations of others. Some of her notable achievements are designing new tracks for MarioKart, putting every piece of text in Paper Mario Sticker Star through inferKit, and remaking New Super Mario Bros. Wii with purposefully awful level design.

Mayro has been making videos of her modding journey since 2016. Mario Maker came out the year before, which provided a new wave of people with access to modding resources. Mayro spent some time making Super Mario Bros. 2 mods before taking a break and moving on to ROM-hacking 3D games. ROM-hacking is a method of modifying a game’s code through its ROM (Read-only memory) image file. The ROM is copied from its chip and put into a hex editor program, allowing the hacker to modify level data, language, and even game functions. The modded game is then played on an emulator, a device or software designed to play any game regardless of if it was only designed for a specific console. Using this mix of both professional and DIY-grade software, Mayro was able to accomplish a wide variety of effects, such as purposefully corrupting Super Mario Galaxy assets and making her own tracks in various MarioKart games

One of Mayro’s custom battle tracks for MK8.

Mayro also occasionally experiments with text generation. She is a fan of mistranslated Nintendo games and has livestreamed playthroughs of several of them, but soon decided to try making a spinoff of her own. A game that gets dunked on a lot for having a poor story is the RPG Paper Mario Sticker Star. So Mayro ‘fixed’ it by running the entire text through an AI. The results were unique.

She also rewrote Deltarune 3 with AI, none of which contains suitable article material.

Perhaps what Mayro is most well-known for though was her return to modding the Mario platformers in 2023, namely New Super Mario Bros. Wii. She created several challenge runs for NSMBW, including a one where the player cannot collect any coins, and a ‘floor is lava’ challenge where she replaces almost all ground with lava tiles and forces the player to jump on top of question blocks to survive. She then went on to make Nightmare Mario Wii, the ‘most annoying’ hack for NSMBW. Nightmare Mario Wii is a showcase of how Mayro’s talent as a modder has grown, proving her knowledge of design by utterly subverting it. The levels aren’t hard so much as they are obnoxious, ranging from luck-based minigames to actual math problems to garbage commissioned by her twitch chat.

The first level of Nightmare Mario Wii. Need we say more?

As much as Mayro loves creating, she also partakes in playtesting ROM-hacks other people made. She was also the first player to beat Harder Mario Bros. Meltdown, one of the most difficult Mario Wii mods, without quicksaving. But most important is her fan interactions. She has a mini series where she reviews low-quality Mario Maker levels fans challenge her to beat, and she even made a video on Clarissa’s Crack Hack, a knockoff of her own Nightmare Mario Wii. This camera persona, along with her skill and passion, make Mayro one of the central figures for the Nintendo modding community.