Memorabilia

Memorabilia. Everyone's favorite hack. It was a gift from us to us.

As mentioned and expanded upon in the Halo 14 Side B recollection, we were incredibly happy that Spooonsss was able to make the ASM work, and that it actually worked as well as we were hoping. MarchromT30A was an introduction to the gimmick. The original version of the level that went out for testing was probably 2 or 3 times longer than what was released. But that made us realize that this should really be expanded upon.

As usual with us, we initially planned for this hack to be quite a bit shorter than it ended up being.

Contrary to popular belief, the first thing we did when starting this hack was apply input playback asm to every single level. There was no building or playtesting that was done in real time - we made sure that the experience for us playing would mimic the player experience as closely as possible. This included us playing each other's rooms blindly to check for possible confusion or unnecessary setup tightness.

Design considerations were pretty strict as well. Throughout the whole hack, there are only 2 rooms where you need to do more than 3 series of inputs before you have something to guide against. That way the player always has a resting point to gather their thoughts and move on to the next obstacle. Even the final autoscroller is set up in a way that allows this, breaking down the level into a memorization of a chain of series of simple inputs.

Originally, the final level of the hack was Time After Time. It wasn't until Stucat_ mentioned that he really enjoyed the scrolling level and wouldn't mind more. You can blame him for the final credits level. But in seriousness, we wanted to make more. A Light and Saela hack without a vertical autoscroller seems blasphemous. B2De81 had the awesome idea of adding a preview of some type for these levels, which Saela found an implementation method for. That led to some absolutely fantastic reactions.

Memorabilia playthroughs have been the most fun for us to watch. Whenever someone would be playing it, messages would inevitably pop up on Light's discord and a small group of us would hang out and watch it together. As of today, we are only aware of seven people who have actually completed the full hack. Watching Katun24 and LouisDoucet finish the whole hack in single sittings was pretty mindblowing. Watching Juzcook fly through a handful of levels like it was second nature was amazing. And we would be remiss if we didn't mention that watching BarbarousKing's playthrough was maybe one of the funniest experiences we have ever had, having a group of friends in Light's discord watching along and reacting constantly. Light even made a supercut of it, and it's revisited from time to time.

We associate incredible memories with this hack not just because of how everyone reacted to it. It was also a hack where we felt truly free and inspired to create exactly what we wanted to, without much second-guessing or compromise. It is very similar to Ascension in that way. We are still very happy with how varied the hack is despite the limitations of the gimmick. When we got done we felt like nothing more could be added to it.

There was however one specific idea we had thought about for a potential sequel. It's most likely never going to happen though.

Extra special thanks to Stucat_ for the art on this. We always just explain the barebones concept of the hacks to him, and then give him free reign to make whatever he wants. This time around, he decided to make multiple pieces of art that would act almost like trading cards. Every one of them is fantastic.

By the time this hack was released, both of us had become very good at it. We play through every hack we make hundreds of times and managed to speedrun Memorabilia in roughly 40 minutes. We even made remix/challenge versions for each other. After the release, Saela took the hack and removed the input playback, added 30 hidden kaizo blocks throughout it, added reverse controls, and sent it to Light. Light then had a challenge where he had to play the normal and changed version side by side, finishing the reverse room while the input playback played out. Fun times.