Grab your proton pack, eh — Sega’s weird little 1990 Ghostbusters game just got the biggest fan-made upgrade of its afterlife.
BillyTime!Games — the self-described “retro gaming mad scientist” behind Ghostbusters: Special Edition — rang in October by dropping version 3.0 of the free Genesis ROM hack on October 1, and it’s an absolute monster. What started in 2023 as a humble patch to finally add Winston Zeddemore to Sega and Compile’s run ‘n’ gun — the original inexplicably left the fourth Ghostbuster out of a roster of only Peter, Ray, and Egon — has snowballed into one of the most ambitious ROM hacks in the scene. And 3.0 might be its biggest swing yet.
The headliner: all four heroes — Venkman, Stantz, Spengler, and Zeddemore — are now playable in their Real Ghostbusters cartoon forms. And this isn’t a palette-swap parade: the dev insists each cartoon Buster plays differently, offering what he calls “a highly different experience” from their prime counterparts. As a Saturday-morning-cartoon kid, I am absolutely here for it.
But v3.0 doesn’t stop there. The roster also gains Kylie Griffin from Extreme Ghostbusters and — because the ’90s were a beautiful fever dream — the Crash Test Dummy from The Incredible Crash Dummies as playable characters. Yes, really. A new character select screen ties it all together, alongside fresh costumes, randomized title-screen colours, and a brand-new cheat menu: God Mode, Invisible Buster Shots, 2x Money, and Infinite Traps.
There’s even a new Columns mini-game — because why not — where you match gems shaped like Sam-Hain and the Terror Dogs, Zuul and Vinz Clortho. (I had to look that one up; nobody’s perfect.) Finish the campaign on Normal, Hard, or Nightmare and you’ll now earn difficulty-based rewards, which should give retro completionists a proper reason to sweat through the hardest setting.
A word of caution, though: some of the new secrets push the Genesis harder than 1990 hardware ever planned for. Certain hidden content leans on bank switching, so the dev recommends Genesis Plus GX, a Mega EverDrive Pro, or the Sega Channel Revival MiSTer core to see everything. The main game runs everywhere — just don’t come crying if your favourite emulator can’t find the bonus rooms.
Huge respect is due here: this whole thing started life as an MD+ patch idea and “turned into me packing more and more things in,” according to the dev — who, by the way, expanded the game from 512 KB to 1.5 MB by poking at RAM addresses with a hex editor. In a recent interview he also mentioned his work keeps getting sold on eBay for $200-plus despite being strictly free — “a simple labour of love,” as he put it. Labour of love, indeed.
So: are you firing up a 36-year-old ghostbusting cartridge this spooky season, or what?
Sources: Console Classics — Ghostbusters Special Edition 3.0 Adds Real Ghostbusters and New Secrets · Time Extension interview with BillyTime!Games · The patch is a free, patch-only download at the Ghostbusters: Special Edition project page on Romhack Plaza (requires the user’s own copy of the original game — no ROMs or ISOs).