Hacks

**Hacks**, or often called **Editions** are customized versions of the official Super Mario Flash games, and are often created by the Level Palace community, to give users and level makers more level making and playing variety. Most hacks come packed with completely new *tilesets*, *themes* & *music*, allowing for more creativity and unique levels to be made by level designers.

## Overview

There are many types of hacks, ranging from simple tileset swaps to hacks changed to another game theme, like Wario Land Flash.

While most hacks are texture hacks, which only change graphics and music, there are also hacks that have edited Actionscript, but the amount of hacks using this technology is low at the moment.

## History

### Trying to hack (2009)

An old forum (called Super Mario Flash Extra) before Level Palace existed, once tried to hack the SMF series of games but failed because there was a lack of knowledge and technology for it. One user from this site, named Beglerbeg, was likely the first one to ever create a hack. This hack was called Fast Mario and it's a Super Mario Flash hack, featuring texture and music hacks. However, apparently a lot of people had forgotten about it, maybe because of the launch of Super Mario Flash 2 that came packed with a lot more content than SMF1. The existence of this hack was only later re-discovered in 2015, and unless someone comes across an even older hack and has proof of it being older, this hack currently stands as the first SMF1 hack in SMF history.

### Early Days (2013)

Many years later, April 14th, 2013 in particular, an user by the name of SPF180 has found out how to change SMF1's textures using a program called Sothink SWF Decompiler. The hack consisted of replacing a music song with 'Good Time' by Owl City, a forest background and a very simple title screen likely to be made with Microsoft Paint. The level featured this hack was later posted under the name 'Super Mario Flash Custom Music and Background'. Another user by the name of ZidaneZ with the help of SPF180 had created a simple SMF2 hack that just changes the default backgrounds, named Super Mario Muth and is actually the first SMF2 hack. Obviously these weren't professional hacks, but many users saw the potential in what this hacking method could be used for - just imagine the whole SMF2 being re-skinned in a brand new theme - causing the SMF community to look bright into the future, and a select few users immediately began working on the first "Major hacks", particularly BrokenAce and Popthatcorn14, which later resulted in the creation of Super Mario Flash 2 Aced and Super Pop Flash. Both these hacks haven't aged well nowadays, but they were revolutionary for its time - and in a short span of time, there were a ton of levels being produced in these hacks.

### The rise of hacking (2014-2015)

These years were gonna be the years for SMF hacking to become a mainstream part of SMF and level making, where many at the end of 2013 were expecting a lot of new hacks to be developed the upcomming year. And they were right, since in this year, there were constantly new hacks coming out, with an upped level of professionalism and quality; hacks that were very revolutionary still to this day came out in this year. Some examples are Super Mario Flash 2: Ultimate Edition, Cryogenic Edition, Enhanced Edition and the still praised Desert Edition. Texture hacks were at its prime in this time, and technology was still evolving as at the end of 2015, an user called TheRussian has found out a way to edit in-game text using a Hex Editing method. There were also attempts to add new things to the game, but the technology and knowledge wasn't there yet.

### Updates, new features, new great hacks (2016-2020)

At the end of 2016, a Japanese group consisting of a few people have done some revolutionary changes to the vanilla Super Mario Flash 2. In particular, an user by the name of Chairo, who is part of the Japanese SMF team, is the first person to ever figure out how to actually *add* new content to the game without causing glitches. Now going by the name Super Mario Flash Version C, this still being updated to this day vanilla SMF2 has gotten several new innovative features such as in-level background & music changers, custom music support (using .mp3), the ability to change a level's default settings (such as what item you start with in your *inventory box*), and an inclusion of tons and tons of new tiles and tilesets. Later, in 2017, SMF1 was also updated by Hiro. Of course, this caused a huge demand for updated SMF hacks, but due to there being so much content in the games now, hack development takes a lot of time and work nowadays, so SMF hacking has dramatically slowed down. There are only a select hacks out there that run on the updated version of SMF1 (Version E), and SMF2 Version C, which as of now are Super Mario Flash: Candy Edition, Super Mario Flash 2: Jungle Edition and Super Luigi Flash 2.