“The Blue Shell was even stripped of its wings, although inexplicably it can still fly – a cruel…”
“The Blue Shell was even stripped of its wings, although inexplicably it can still fly – a cruel illogic meant to wrest its last faculty from its brainless husk.”
A peek into the underground world of fan-translated games
A peek into the underground world of fan-translated games:
But then Erbrecht had an idea.
“It was actually one or two days prior when someone joined an EarthBound chatroom claiming to have a leaked copy of the Mother 3 ROM file,” he told Polygon. “I started talking to him and a couple other people from the chatroom, and eventually the idea came up to try making a translation patch. We put out a call for volunteers to help with both the translation and the programming.”
A year slipped by and Nintendo didn’t announce a localization. Erbrecht stews. A country away in Florida, in 2007, FUNimation translator Clyde Mandelin also gives up on waiting for an official version and begins setting wheels in motion to create his own localization.
Both Erbrecht and Mandelin make one thing clear: fan translations are born from passion, from an individual or group’s desire to get a Japanese game into the hands of a non-Japanese-speaking audience — an audience that, for one reason or another, would never get to experience games that get passed up for the official localization treatment. These works are more than passion projects, they are life achievements, good deeds, pro-bono work — projects created by fans purely for fans.
Mandelin — professional translator by day, fan translator by night — is part of the team that created the most well-known English translation for Mother 3. This fan translation was released publicly in October 2008 and has even caught the attention of Nintendo — most notably its American branch’s big guy himself, Reggie Fils-Aime. Mandelin and his group of EarthBound fans — a patchwork of people from different walks of life and different continents — are so deeply entrenched in their love for the Mother series that they even offered Nintendo their translation script for nothing should it make things easier for the company to localize it.
On fan translations of games.
The Impending Crash Of The Videogame Console Market
The Impending Crash Of The Videogame Console Market:
Natasha Lomas on how the numbers are shaping up so far in the gaming console space:
The thing is neither of these new generation console flagships is selling very well when compared with previous generations of flagship consoles. The console market appears to be shrinking significantly — and that’s evidently having a knock-on impact on games studios and game development.
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At this relatively early stage the new generation stacks up as follows: Wii U at 6 million, XB1 at ~4 million and PS4 at 6 million: a total of ~16 million. So only around 244 million to go — just to perform as well as the last generation. But with game budgets increasing a flat console market isn’t a good thing. This new generation needs to be outselling the last, not looking like it’s going to have a really tough time shipping the same.
True-ish Grit
If you were to anthropomorphize the contemporary American mainstream video game, it would look, I think, a bit like a harrowingly male, shaggily haired, extremely confident 18-year-old capable of any number of astounding displays of strength or agility. Smart, too, in his way. Not incurious about things outside the realm of his immediate experience so much as oblivious to them. All the same, this young man has potentially interesting things to say. Most of us would be willing to listen, too, but for the fact that his breath smells like peanut butter and he’s wearing a Boris Vallejo T-shirt.
Despite the yada yada of video games’ growing cultural prominence, the amount of money they make (and lose), and the simple reality that maybe no creative medium has ever moved further faster, most people don’t take video games very seriously. I realize this comes as a shock to precisely no one who doesn’t play video games. Sometimes the fact that games are written off as adolescent nonsense bugs me. Sometimes it doesn’t, because a lot of games — a lot of great games — are adolescent nonsense. And sometimes I think that the worst thing to happen to video games would be for them to get taught widely in schools1 and reviewed in The New Yorker. As the novelist and critic (and gamer!) John Lanchester once wisely noted, “Respectability is a terrible thing for any art form. People wrote better novels when the cultural status of the novel was contested.”
On videogames in (North) American culture.