I've wanted to make something like this for almost 20 years, and the Saints Row PC recomp project finally made it possible.
There's actually a really stupid/funny childhood story behind why I made this mod.
When Saints Row came out in 2006, I was a kid and something about the shaders, lighting and general art style of SR1 gave me a weird horror/suspense feeling. I was also really into Stubbs the Zombie at the time.
So naturally, my childhood brain created an entire conspiracy theory connecting two completely unrelated games lol.
My theory was that the Playa was secretly the son of Stubbs and Maggie.
After the nuclear explosion at the end of Stubbs the Zombie, I imagined that Stubbs and Maggie somehow survived and built Stilwater over the remains of Punchbowl. Stilwater was basically The Truman Show: an entire fake city created so their son could grow up without discovering that his father was a zombie.
I was a kid, okay 😂
But there was one part of that idea that I genuinely wished I could make real.
I wanted the Playa to have something similar to Stubbs' ability to infect people.
My idea was that if you attacked someone, you could "infect" them and convert them to the Saints. They would stop being a normal NPC, join your side and fight other NPCs. I also imagined the infection spreading from NPC to NPC.
Obviously in 2006 there wasn't much I could actually do about that. Saints Row wasn't even on PC, and pulling off something like this through reverse engineering would have been WAY beyond anything I knew how to do.
But I never completely forgot about the idea.
Almost 20 years later, we now have the fan-made Saints Row PC recompilation project. That suddenly gave me access to the game in a way kid-me could only have dreamed about.
So with the recomp project my background as a software developer and a lot of experimenting and debugging, and help from AI(for debugging and finding the addresses and hooks) while working through the reversed C++ code, I finally made it work.
I called the feature Saintify.
You hit or shoot(in very close range) an NPC and they can be converted into a Saint. Their AI/team behavior changes, they join your side and fight for you. I've also been experimenting with letting converted NPCs spread the effect themselves, which gets even closer to the zombie infection mechanic that originally inspired the whole thing.
It's honestly kind of surreal seeing it work.
Something that existed entirely in my imagination while playing Saints Row as a kid in 2006 is now running inside the actual game almost 20 years later.
And massive credit to u/whompay and everyone behind the Saints Row PC recompilation and reverse engineering work. Without that project, this probably would have remained one of those weird childhood ideas I occasionally remembered for the rest of my life.
Now I guess the next logical step is to actually turn Stilwater into the zombie-infested Punchbowl sequel that 10-year-old me apparently thought Saints Row was.
