This is a thread about a series of relatively obscure doujin games from a creative circle in Japan. The games are named Hack9, Hacker9, and Hack9 Solid (among others; they’ve created many strange and interesting games).
Here’s a picture of Hack9 (2008) (PC):
The circle that created these games goes by the name BLACK BASTARD
(I know, I know! Look, I didn’t pick the name, okay? I’m quite sure they meant no harm with it.).
Thankfully, they also go by far less inflamatory-seeming name wahiko94. Most of their URLs and social media presence are under the wahiko94 name so for the sake of our collective sanity I think it best we refer to them by that name.
Social media links:
Twitter: wahiko94
Alt Twitter: wahiko942
I don’t know why they have two Twitters.
To the best of my ability to discern they have no presence on Bluesky at this juncture.
Originally they had a web site at this URL:
BLACK BASTARD
But it doesn’t work anymore!
wahiko94 took it down to redesign it a few years back and has yet to do so. Not a big deal though.
Here’s a decent mirror of the old site on Archive.org which provides access to URLs by which you might, through a bit of indirection, obtain Hack9 Solid and other wahiko94 games that haven’t been hosted on itch.
BLACK BASTARD
They also have some sort of blog. It looks a bit crufty but it does seem to be receiving updates. It can be found here:
BlackBastardBlog
wahiko94’s itch.io page is here:
wahiko.itch.io
The two games that have been fan translated into English (more about that further along in this thread if you’re curious) can be found below, along with English language readme files that surprisingly not dead links despite wahiko’s former home page being down for reconstruction:
Hack9 (English) (readme.txt)
Hacker9 (English) (readme.txt)
Also, for those who find the game frustratingly difficult I have created a hacked save file (get it here) [Thanks to OldCoder for the hosting].
It provides more in-game money than one could ever possibly need and starts you off having already purchased and used all of the HP and MP Booster items being sold by the vendor inside of the Battleship you start off in.
These games can be a little bit finicky to run on Windows 10/11, especially when running a multi-monitor setup. In point of fact they’re a fucking menace! I believe this to be because they’re made using a version of Multimedia Fusion of similar vintage to the one that the original Cave Story was created on.
They don’t fullscreen all that well at all. They might even crash if you use their built-in fullscreen functionality. It’s all a little bit crufty. Thankfully, I have finally divined a solution for this!
Use Magpie, a free and open source (GPLv3) Integer scaler if you want to play any of these in fullscreen. This tool is simple, seamless, and makes streaming these games a snap (well, at least with OBS desktop capture; haven’t tested with game or window capture yet)!
You can get Magpie here:
Magpie
Magpie looks like this:
Anyway, the rest of this post is from 2018 so don’t judge too harshly. I was in a bad physical and mental state that year so the writing may be a bit crude; my brain still doesn’t function very well here in 2025 as I’m writing this paragraph. Nevertheless, I believe that the information in this thread should be essentially faithful. However, you only need the information above this paragraph to enjoy these games. Sometime down the road I will attempt to make a section for Hack9 Solid, the yet-untranslated foray that takes the series into the 3rd dimension.
You may or may not recall Hack9 from roughly 10 years back. The readme.txt files I linked list the original release dates! Hacker9 is more recent. I get the sense that Hacker9 may have been released simultaneously in Japanese in English last year (2017). Then again, I could swear I played it back in the day before Hack9 was in English. However, in those days it was hard to tell what was going on with anything of or relating to these games (at least for the Japanese-illiterate).
Thanks to @creep, I know that this game first came to my awareness from this IndieGames Blog post from back in August 2008.
Yeah, that old link died when IndieGames.com became IndieGamesPlus.com. However, thanks to the amazing powers of the Internet Archive we can find a mirror of the old page here! To this day, this is still about the only discussion of this game that I’ve been able to find, and it looks as though a few of the commenting users may have had some viable walkthrough fodder/strategies to impart–or at least they would have if the comments hadn’t been on a Disqus comment section that doesn’t seem to have been archived 
–granted only portions of the comment section were worthwhile. There were a few posts in it that captured my interest long ago but they’re not worth mentioning.
I used to think it a bit strange that these games were represented as Cave Story mods, but looking at the readme.txt for Hack9, it appears that may be correct in some sense, as it clearly mentions Daisuke Amaya and Cave Story. The Hack9 readme.txt also mentions bullet physics and box2D, but it’s not entirely clear how much of a part the bullet physics play in any aspect of the games. The alternate theory is that both games use the same engine. I want to say it was Multimedia Fusion but I’m not too clear on that point at the moment.
The use of Box2D is pretty obvious from the way items in the world go rotating and flipping all over the place when touched. It’s interesting to note from older videos of Hack9 on NicoNico that the game did not always use Box2D. At some point it is apparent that wahiko94 (aka BLACK BASTARD) must have back ported the Hacker9 engine to be the base engine for Hack9.
The translations appear to be relatively fresh. I think the Hack9 English translation is copyrighted for 2018 and Hacker9 with a copyright date of 2017 (copyright is, naturally, assigned to, “BRACK BASTARD” thereby perpetuating stereotypes persisting from the apparent inability of the Japanese language to differentiate ‘R’ and ‘L’ sounds). So, these seem to be fresh. I sure wasn’t able to find much of anything by searching these forums anyway.
Those details aside, the games are rather Metroidvania-esque. More specifically they feel a whole Hell of a lot like a blisteringly difficult variation on Cave Story. I have yet to compare the cave tile sets to see whether or not the author borrowed any actual art from CS. That said, the way the protagonist of the two Hack[er]9 games, whose name appears to be Snort (wow :3 what a name, yo), controls very similarly to Quote from Cave Story. The only definitive difference is that Snort seems to have a certain inertia when changing directions on the ground. Maybe Quote had that too? I haven’t played CS in forever, since it doesn’t look as though the old, free-to-download binary from Pixel’s site works on my copy of Windows 10 (or maybe any copy at all; either that or Pixel switched the download up with something he scrogged the graphics on).
Did I mention the difficulty of the Hack[er]9 games, because it is noteworthy? If you’re pondering trying to play these games on, say, a laptop keyboard, I’ll go ahead and spoil it for you: it’s not worth it. The game, particularly at the start, requires a rather rigorous grasp over the fundamentals of side-scrolling platforming if you want to prevail. Further challenges arise given that the only affordable weapon at the start is a weak, diminutive combat knife. Thus far, the strategy I have in mind for defeating the soldiers involves a lot of jumping around to dodge bullets from one side of a soldier to the other while swapping directions and ultimately hovering within knife range. I imagine this will lead to some tedious grinding, at least with Hack9, to acquire enough currency to afford the basic pistol. The upgrade path in Hacker9 is not yet clear to me since the vendor only seems to be carrying knives in his inventory at the start of the game.
I also can’t tell how one increases one’s max HP. Edit: you buy HP upgrades from the item/weapon vendor in the starting area (at least in Hack9).
It’s also not especially clear what MP does. The flavor text of background objects suggest to me that perhaps MP is ammunition? These don’t look, at a glance, like games that would have any sort of “magic” type of system. Edit: Yes, the MP is used by the rocket launcher type weapons as a form of ammo.
The flavor of the game that I’ve been able to absorb thus far gives the game a sort of Metal Gear Solid meets side-scrolling Metroidvania with a bit of Moe protagonist undertones. There’s clearly a story to both games, but I haven’t really absorbed much of either one outside of the background related with white text on a solid black background at the start of each game. I can say, definitively, that they appear to be distinct games with distinct storylines. Their relationship to each other beyond a shared set of NPCs, Snort, enemies, and large swathes of level designs and art assets is not clear to me in the slightest.
If I get hold of a game controller and some means of recording my screen I may attempt an English walkthrough or a nice, quiet, low-commentary (or no-commentary) Let’s Play. That said, if anyone with a more sonorous voice and/or the platformer skills to pay these bills wants to preempt me on this point then by all means, have at it. Just, y’know, try not to spend the whole time quoting your favorite memes or somesuch (though quoting these so-called “birb memes” is okay by me, just a little bit).
Anyway, let’s talk about these games because I’m pretty excited about this. I recently spent 4 months without the Internet, and during that time I got all hyped up for the release of Mother 4, only to discover that, in fact, it hadn’t been released at all. But now this is here, so life has meaning again, almost!
There are also such games as ＨＥＫＡＴＯＮＣＨＥＩＲ, Ghost9, Ghost92, Ghost93, Ghost94, Ghost94 2, and the forthcoming Ghost9 Solid. I have yet to mess with any of them at all, as they’re not translated and thus ultimately unknowable to me.
@loki wrote about Ghost94, which definitely seems to follow from the same series, whatever it is, in this blog post here.
I’ll just edit this if I can think of anything more I want to type here.