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How Three Kids with No Experience Beat Square and Translated Final Fantasy V

161 points by wallflower 10y ago

FullMtlAlcoholc 10y ago
Translating a video game was also one of the primary ways that I learned Japanese. Playing through Chrono Cross while grokking the written form was tremendously rewarding. To this day, I still choose Japanese audio for games if available.
- austinpray 10y ago
  Pokémon on 3DS is wonderful for learning Japanese. It's a game for kids so it's made up of a lot of kana with some low level kanji.
  - ue_ 10y ago
    Unfortunately, even Japanese children are native speakers. I wouldn't recommend going into native material unless one has grammar points and some vocab nailed down, even if the kanji is easy or rare.
    - BEEdwards 10y ago
      ...um even if you are entirely swamped and way confused by the dialog it's still pokemon. You'll be fine.
      - prophesi 10y ago
        My niece set her language to German when she played (and beat) Pokemon X. She was probably 6 or 7 at the time, and didn't know a lick of German.
    - thaumasiotes 10y ago
      Most text in Pokemon is either completely formulaic ("A wild <Pokemon> appeared!" "Charmander used Ember" "It's not very effective") or a one-off pre-combat joke from a trainer ("I like shorts!"). It's pretty easygoing stuff.
    - mikekchar 10y ago
      Your advice is common amongst educators these days, but the general consensus in language acquisition research is completely the opposite. If you can understand something, with enough repetition, you will acquire it. Free reading of native material is hands down the most effective way to acquire a second language that we know about. There are quite a lot of scholarly works accessible from the internet on the topic, so if you are interested I recommend taking a look. I was going to link some examples, but it's probably better for you to find your own way without my biases.
- rpazyaquian 10y ago
  I've read and heard enough Japanese to be able to pick out the differences in VA direction between English and Japanese audio tracks. 90% of the time, I end up preferring the Japanese tracks.
  - Nexxxeh 10y ago
    Native audio with English subs for me. It feels rare to find an English dub that's good. I thought maybe it was just a Japanese thing, but then I watched the (excellent) series Wakfu. The French audio was much bett
- Kurtz79 10y ago
  I find mind boggling the amount of games that have been released only in Japan. Even series popular in the West like Final Fantasy, Shin Megami Tensei, Ace Attorney, Fire Emblem have had Japan-only releases, I cannot even imagine how many lesser known titles are lost to western audiences. Probably Japan is kind of an outlier, but I guess other countries with a large enough market to support games developed for local (not global) audiences would have a similar phenomenon, I wonder if there is some hidden gem developed in China, Korea, India, Brasil that we will never be able to play...
  - sotojuan 10y ago
    It's way worse if you were European. Did you know that the first OFFICIAL release of Chrono Trigger in Europe was the 2009 DS remake?
    - voltagex_ 10y ago
      Same in Australia, I think. I owned a ridiculous setup with a NTSC->PAL cart converter and an old CRT just to play Chrono Trigger, at one point.
- brilliantcode 10y ago
  I learned Japanese by osmosis-watching lots of JAV in my younger days forced me to learn in order to identify what was being said to maximize utility. Our drivers were different but you actually produced a patch enjoyed by a lot of j-RPG fans that came
  - jungletek 10y ago
    Japanese Adult Video?
luckyt 10y ago
Wow, the modifying assembly code part was impressive! I wouldn't even be able to find the dialog drawing routine amid thousands of lines of undocumented assembly, let alone modify it. It's amazing that a high school kid could figure it out.
- angrycoder 10y ago
  To get an idea of how rom hacking works, check out this video from doublefine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FolqIgQRtl0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FolqIgQRtl0 Its mostly setting watches and breakpoints in the emulator, not digging through code. My mind was blown the first time I watched it.
  - coldpie 10y ago
    If you like this kind of thing, just go in and give it a shot! The NES is a great place to start, just three registers and simple instruction set. The display unit ABI is well documented and there's a couple of NES debuggers out there. Starting with no experience, I wrote a program to dump level images straight from a ROM: https://gitlab.com/mcmapper/mcmapper/blob/master/main.c https://gitlab.com/mcmapper/mcmapper/blob/master/main.c https://tcrf.net/Proto:M.C._Kids https://tcrf.net/Proto:M.C._Kids
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    The early stuff he shows can be done on most emulators as a way to cheat. Done it ever so often when i get bored with a game. Sometimes locking the health value will freeze a game though as developers use a cheap refill animation on leveling up or beating a boss, and you end up with the animation getting stuck as the emulator keeps resetting the value. I have never owned one, but i think gamesharks and others work similarly.
    - notamy 10y ago
      Yes! Gamesharks / Action Replays / similar gave you an "instruction set" of sorts that was interpreted as instructions of sorts - write value to address, do if value at address is X, and so on. When I was messing with one on the Nintendo DS a few years back, you were actually able to write ARM (and THUMB, I believe) ASM and compile it to the target system (NDS) that could be loaded through the Action Replay. I'll have to check if I can dig up my old notes on this stuff when I'm home...
soylentcola 10y ago
Wow, what a flashback! I remember following various translation teams and their progress while in college and playing all sorts of SNES games I'd never gotten to play as a kid (via zSNES). I remember the drama of the early leak and the eventual "proper" release. Realizing that it was 20 years ago caught me by surprise.
- dlevine 10y ago
  Yeah. I remember playing through all the FF games (and a bunch of other RPGs) that hadn't been translated into English when I was in college in the late 90's. It's great that most of them have been remade since, but there is a lot of nostalgia in playing the originals on emulators.
smaili 10y ago
Great read that brings back some good memories. As an avid FF fan, I never quite understood why SquareSoft decided to not bring over some of their games to the US market. If anyone happens to know the reason(s) - please share!
- Avenger42 10y ago
  For Seiken Densetsu 3, Wikipedia links to an article that stated: "...the game's North American release had been canceled by Square's American branch due to programming bugs that they deemed impossible to fix in a timely manner." For Final Fantasy II: "the long development time, the age of the original Japanese game and the arrival of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System [...] led Square Soft to cancel work on the Final Fantasy II localization in favor of the recently released Final Fantasy IV" Similarly for Final Fantasy III: "...Square was focused on developing for Nintendo's new console."
  - scott_s 10y ago
    On SD3, I read that the "bugs" are mostly because English text took up more space than Japanese. From an article by Jermey Parish [1]: "Seiken Densetsu 3 was among the first games to receive a fan translation, and Neil Corlett's localization crew was fairly open about the difficulty of that process. SD3 was a huge game on a cramped cartridge, and the Japanese version -- already benefiting from the density of kanji text -- employed a custom compression system that would have made it practically impossible for a localized version of the game to fit within the confines of the ROM without the removal of massive chunks of content. The simple fact is that SD3 was likely never intended for localization, because the process would have been impossible." [1] http://www.gamespite.net/toastywiki/index.php/Games/G637-SecretOfEvermore http://www.gamespite.net/toastywiki/index.php/Games/G637-Sec...
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      Yeah i recall various ROM patches coming complete with special fonts so they could fit the english text into the boxes etc of the original game ui without having to hack in extra pages of scrolling or similar. Kanji allows for some very info-dense UIs.
apetresc 10y ago
I hope this observation doesn't come across as bigoted or insensitive in any way, but I find it interesting how common transgender people (like the star of this article) are in the emulator/rom dev community. I can think of four or five other very prominent examples just off the top of my head – and it's not a very large community. It's certainly a greater proportion than the general population. Honestly I can think of more trans-women coding emulators than biologically-born women. I just wonder why such an unrelated-seeming correlation occurs.
- ska 10y ago
  Many online communities historically have been bigoted and misogynist. If the effect you observe is real, perhaps it's just the reflection of a community that attracted and kept more people over the years because it wasn't (as much) like that?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - projektir 10y ago
    Why are there so few biologically born women in those same communities, then?
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - apetresc 10y ago
    I have no direct experience, but I would be surprised if that were true. Emulator development is the perfect intersection of, like, three different communities (low-level tech, video games, and open source) that are (at least on HN) perceived as extra-unwelcoming to women. I don't see why combining all three would cancel that out. I would also note that writing an emulator is not something you just stumble into because the people are friendly or whatever. It requires an extremely honed set of quite niche skills. I think it takes something more to become successful at it than just "I guess I'll stick around because everywhere else is even meaner."
tannhauser23 10y ago
I remember playing this when it came out! It was such a magical moment. It completely blew my mind that there was a SNES Final Fantasy game that we were never meant to play - I think I only found it accidentally when I was browsing ROM sites. I thought it was a homemade hack or something. I never imagined that it was a real game! Haha what a great memory.
jimmies 10y ago
Holy shit, this bring back memories. I did something similar with the Harry Potter series about 15 years ago - beat the publisher to translating the book. Doing that, strangely, is the one event that shaped my life the most. I discovered Harry Potter series up until book 4 (The Globet of Fire) by renting books from a bookstore when I was 15. At that time, many Vietnamese kids were all eager for book 5 to come out. Except for when book 5, The Half-blood Prince came, we had to wait for it. We would have to wait for the "blessed" translator and the publisher to translate and churn out the whole book when a new book comes, and with all the proofreading it would take about 4-6 months. I decided that was too long and started posting on a quite popular forum my indie translation, then moved to my personal website. Being a 16-year-old having a summer break at that time, I had nothing better to do. My timetable was something like stay up all night to translate half a chapter, post the new translation, go to bed at 6 AM, wake up at 11 AM, the next day rinse and repeat. People loved it and many started contacting me to help with the translation. We had a YUUUUGE following to the point that I had to do nothing but just organizing and assigning who-does-what and then proofread it with my 16-year-old brain, but mostly we flew under the radar and it was easy. The complete translated book came out about 20 days after the English version. The normies still had to wait for the blessed book to read it, but anyone who had the Internet already read the whole story months earlier. People would bring A4-sized printouts to read at school and my older brother was asked more than once whether he knew the person who translated it from time to time. Book 6 wasn't a happy story but a fun one. When book 6 came, I knew so much better that I knew to appoint someone that did the logistics for me. I did the fun part, code a website that allows us to automate the translation submission and make sure it can handle the traffic. At that time Vietnam has just signed the Bern copyright convention, and my indie translation was the center of attention. In the past book translation, we gave out our real names or real nick-names, however the translator wanted it. We had about 4-5 chapters churned out before we realized that we were in big troubles. I remember one night I received an email to my personal mailbox at 10 PM from a journalist asking something along the lines of "Do you know you're doing something illegal?" I was scared shitless and fucking deleted everything, thinking this is it - this is the end, and went to bed, not responding to the journalist. Then at 5 AM, not being able to sleep, I checked email again and the same reporter sent another email... "I see that you deleted everything. This is totally not my intention. I won't rat you out. If possible, please let me know if we can do a secret interview. You might think that I am being dishonest but please trust me this time, I want you to continue what you are doing. I hope to see the new chapter coming out tomorrow." I immediately removed all real names and asked everyone on the team to choose a nickname for themselves. I actually gave out my home address to the reporter and he turned out to be a hipster-looking student studying journalism writing part-time for a newspaper. We became good friends after that. Besides the interview, the translation at that time was so controversial that it sparked the discussion whether it is "right" or "wrong" to do on many online forums. I had google analytics at the time so I knew who was linking to the website. I registered a nickname just to talk my side of the story in one of them. It turned out that the admin of the forum was someone who studied in Princeton and three years later, when I dropped out of college, disheartened by what I saw and discouraged by what happened, he asked me to go study abroad. I would otherwise have never dreamt of doing that. Another online friend who is 40+ at that time asked me to work for him in the gap year, appointed me to his "vice-president" role of his company. The rest is just history. Thanks to the event and all that came after it, I knew probably 50% of all online friends that I admire and probably won't ever know otherwise. By the way, when book 7 came out (when I was having my "gap year"), I decided not to do it anymore. It was too much to handle. Someone else I knew did it, though.
borkt 10y ago
I am so happy to see this article. I used to play the Japanese release PSO with Barubary a LOT and heard bits and pieces about the FFV translation. At the time they were at UCI I believe and I was just in 7th grade. Baru always seemed incredibly skilled and was extremely patient with me and helped me learn some basic coding, such as creating custom names for items that worked online. It got me into engineering in general and though I ended up working in Materials Engineering rather than software it was an excellent influence on me and pushed me to learn by reverse engineering. I always imagined Baru would end up somewhere with a career in Video Game development and am thrilled to see it is true.
- segmondy 10y ago
  I wonder if it's the same barubary. I started a psx dev group in the 90's gridlock. I just finished high school and this kid barubary joined and his work was amazing. Most of us in the scene went into the industry. I didn't cuz I didn't want 80hr weeks.
  - gadgetDev 10y ago
    PSX dev was lots of fun and challenging at the time with so little documentation. Still something I'd love to get back to if I have the time. Someone spun up a site a bit ago called psxdev net that's pretty active. Btw, gadget from gridlock :)
    - segmondy 10y ago
      Hey mate!
iaw 10y ago
>“It’s hard to express how big of a deal it was at the time,” Every so often I meet someone who worked on something that was influential on me as a youth. I'm glad I got a chance to read this, playing the rom it was always a mystery where it came from. A lot of us owe Myria a debt of gratitude.
appetizer 10y ago
Also mentioned in the article, but Seiken Densetsu 3 was one of the most fun and amazing games I ever played. I hadn't seen the 'action RPG' style before, and it just added a new level of adrenaline
herval 10y ago
A long time ago, I translated Civilization 1 to Brazilian Portuguese. Eventually (like, 15 years later?) I got to work for a guy that worked on CIV I, and he told me they just found my translation, fixed some stuff and put it up as the official one (I put it in the most popular BBS at the time) Good times.
shriphani 10y ago
I love stories like this - right from Sneferu in ancient Egypt to a driven high-schooler - drive leads people to great things. And when we see the output we are just left to wonder what fueled it and how we can harness that same drive.
gregpardo 10y ago
I learned how to program in the Rom Hacking scene and was involved with a team that released 4 patches for games. The amount of dedication and hours our team put in was incredible. I think I managed around 30-40 hours with high-school. Also, a lot of the reasons some games never made it stateside or came way late was often financial or political. The US versions of these companies often ran slightly independent from the Japanese game studios and the RPG adoption was not huge in the early console days here yet.
roflchoppa 10y ago
reading about how all these guys were meeting up in IRC's just to hang out makes me miss the old web. Anyone know any welcoming IRCs?
ABCLAW 10y ago
Projects like this caused me to fall in love with tech as a kid, and my subsequent career arc was largely premised on the notion "how do we bring this type of amazing innovation into safe legal waters and allow it to flourish". I played FFV. I played a ton of fan translations. Heck, I completed the entire SNES rpg catalog, both JP and ENG. Thanks for sharing this. ~~~ Re: Translation and Fan-mods in general. Many game developers fail to recognize that their works inadvertently become platforms, and that the platformization of stellar works is both the cause and effect of their spectacular success. There are a ton of crystal clear examples of this phenomenon. Unfortunately it is tremendously common that developers and publishers chop their own legs out from under them when attempting to re-seize control of these platforms to monetize them. Often their attempts destroy value, and terminally damage their brands.
- derefr 10y ago
  What good is brand value if you can't monetize any of it?
  - toyg 10y ago
    There are ways to monetize in a respectful way - for example, by making new games in the universe that your previous "platform" made so popular. You don't have to nickle & dime all the time to make a buck.
  - ABCLAW 10y ago
    There's a false dilemma stemming out of the word "any". In reality there's an equilibrium between giving and taking. If you don't monetize enough, you can't stay afloat as a developer and you're left with a brand asset for sale upon liquidation. If you take control of community produced goods in order to take the entire pie for yourself, your fanbase will slow or stop producing incidental free value for your projects and your core evangelists will begin jumping ship to greener pastures. This doesn't kill you immediately, but it also doesn't position you for long term growth.
gumby 10y ago
title should be "...Square Enix and...". The company "Square" ≠ "Square Enix"
- DerekL 10y ago
  No, the article is correct. This was before the merger with Enix, and the company was called “Square”, and sometimes used the name “Squaresoft”.
  - gumby 10y ago
    Thanks
    - Icerain 10y ago
      Squaresoft was the american subsidiary. The name didn't came out of nowhere

161 points by wallflower 10y ago

Translating a video game was also one of the primary ways that I learned Japanese. Playing through Chrono Cross while grokking the written form was tremendously rewarding. To this day, I still choose Japanese audio for games if available.

austinpray 10y ago
Pokémon on 3DS is wonderful for learning Japanese. It's a game for kids so it's made up of a lot of kana with some low level kanji.
- ue_ 10y ago
  Unfortunately, even Japanese children are native speakers. I wouldn't recommend going into native material unless one has grammar points and some vocab nailed down, even if the kanji is easy or rare.
  - BEEdwards 10y ago
    ...um even if you are entirely swamped and way confused by the dialog it's still pokemon. You'll be fine.
    - prophesi 10y ago
      My niece set her language to German when she played (and beat) Pokemon X. She was probably 6 or 7 at the time, and didn't know a lick of German.
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    Most text in Pokemon is either completely formulaic ("A wild <Pokemon> appeared!" "Charmander used Ember" "It's not very effective") or a one-off pre-combat joke from a trainer ("I like shorts!"). It's pretty easygoing stuff.
  - mikekchar 10y ago
    Your advice is common amongst educators these days, but the general consensus in language acquisition research is completely the opposite. If you can understand something, with enough repetition, you will acquire it. Free reading of native material is hands down the most effective way to acquire a second language that we know about. There are quite a lot of scholarly works accessible from the internet on the topic, so if you are interested I recommend taking a look. I was going to link some examples, but it's probably better for you to find your own way without my biases.
rpazyaquian 10y ago
I've read and heard enough Japanese to be able to pick out the differences in VA direction between English and Japanese audio tracks. 90% of the time, I end up preferring the Japanese tracks.
- Nexxxeh 10y ago
  Native audio with English subs for me. It feels rare to find an English dub that's good. I thought maybe it was just a Japanese thing, but then I watched the (excellent) series Wakfu. The French audio was much bett
Kurtz79 10y ago
I find mind boggling the amount of games that have been released only in Japan. Even series popular in the West like Final Fantasy, Shin Megami Tensei, Ace Attorney, Fire Emblem have had Japan-only releases, I cannot even imagine how many lesser known titles are lost to western audiences. Probably Japan is kind of an outlier, but I guess other countries with a large enough market to support games developed for local (not global) audiences would have a similar phenomenon, I wonder if there is some hidden gem developed in China, Korea, India, Brasil that we will never be able to play...
- sotojuan 10y ago
  It's way worse if you were European. Did you know that the first OFFICIAL release of Chrono Trigger in Europe was the 2009 DS remake?
  - voltagex_ 10y ago
    Same in Australia, I think. I owned a ridiculous setup with a NTSC->PAL cart converter and an old CRT just to play Chrono Trigger, at one point.
brilliantcode 10y ago
I learned Japanese by osmosis-watching lots of JAV in my younger days forced me to learn in order to identify what was being said to maximize utility. Our drivers were different but you actually produced a patch enjoyed by a lot of j-RPG fans that came
- jungletek 10y ago
  Japanese Adult Video?

luckyt 10y ago

Wow, the modifying assembly code part was impressive! I wouldn't even be able to find the dialog drawing routine amid thousands of lines of undocumented assembly, let alone modify it. It's amazing that a high school kid could figure it out.

angrycoder 10y ago
To get an idea of how rom hacking works, check out this video from doublefine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FolqIgQRtl0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FolqIgQRtl0 Its mostly setting watches and breakpoints in the emulator, not digging through code. My mind was blown the first time I watched it.
- coldpie 10y ago
  If you like this kind of thing, just go in and give it a shot! The NES is a great place to start, just three registers and simple instruction set. The display unit ABI is well documented and there's a couple of NES debuggers out there. Starting with no experience, I wrote a program to dump level images straight from a ROM: https://gitlab.com/mcmapper/mcmapper/blob/master/main.c https://gitlab.com/mcmapper/mcmapper/blob/master/main.c https://tcrf.net/Proto:M.C._Kids https://tcrf.net/Proto:M.C._Kids
- digi_owl 10y ago
  The early stuff he shows can be done on most emulators as a way to cheat. Done it ever so often when i get bored with a game. Sometimes locking the health value will freeze a game though as developers use a cheap refill animation on leveling up or beating a boss, and you end up with the animation getting stuck as the emulator keeps resetting the value. I have never owned one, but i think gamesharks and others work similarly.
  - notamy 10y ago
    Yes! Gamesharks / Action Replays / similar gave you an "instruction set" of sorts that was interpreted as instructions of sorts - write value to address, do if value at address is X, and so on. When I was messing with one on the Nintendo DS a few years back, you were actually able to write ARM (and THUMB, I believe) ASM and compile it to the target system (NDS) that could be loaded through the Action Replay. I'll have to check if I can dig up my old notes on this stuff when I'm home...

soylentcola 10y ago

Wow, what a flashback! I remember following various translation teams and their progress while in college and playing all sorts of SNES games I'd never gotten to play as a kid (via zSNES). I remember the drama of the early leak and the eventual "proper" release. Realizing that it was 20 years ago caught me by surprise.

dlevine 10y ago
Yeah. I remember playing through all the FF games (and a bunch of other RPGs) that hadn't been translated into English when I was in college in the late 90's. It's great that most of them have been remade since, but there is a lot of nostalgia in playing the originals on emulators.

smaili 10y ago

Great read that brings back some good memories. As an avid FF fan, I never quite understood why SquareSoft decided to not bring over some of their games to the US market. If anyone happens to know the reason(s) - please share!

Avenger42 10y ago
For Seiken Densetsu 3, Wikipedia links to an article that stated: "...the game's North American release had been canceled by Square's American branch due to programming bugs that they deemed impossible to fix in a timely manner." For Final Fantasy II: "the long development time, the age of the original Japanese game and the arrival of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System [...] led Square Soft to cancel work on the Final Fantasy II localization in favor of the recently released Final Fantasy IV" Similarly for Final Fantasy III: "...Square was focused on developing for Nintendo's new console."
- scott_s 10y ago
  On SD3, I read that the "bugs" are mostly because English text took up more space than Japanese. From an article by Jermey Parish [1]: "Seiken Densetsu 3 was among the first games to receive a fan translation, and Neil Corlett's localization crew was fairly open about the difficulty of that process. SD3 was a huge game on a cramped cartridge, and the Japanese version -- already benefiting from the density of kanji text -- employed a custom compression system that would have made it practically impossible for a localized version of the game to fit within the confines of the ROM without the removal of massive chunks of content. The simple fact is that SD3 was likely never intended for localization, because the process would have been impossible." [1] http://www.gamespite.net/toastywiki/index.php/Games/G637-SecretOfEvermore http://www.gamespite.net/toastywiki/index.php/Games/G637-Sec...
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Yeah i recall various ROM patches coming complete with special fonts so they could fit the english text into the boxes etc of the original game ui without having to hack in extra pages of scrolling or similar. Kanji allows for some very info-dense UIs.

apetresc 10y ago

I hope this observation doesn't come across as bigoted or insensitive in any way, but I find it interesting how common transgender people (like the star of this article) are in the emulator/rom dev community. I can think of four or five other very prominent examples just off the top of my head – and it's not a very large community. It's certainly a greater proportion than the general population. Honestly I can think of more trans-women coding emulators than biologically-born women. I just wonder why such an unrelated-seeming correlation occurs.

ska 10y ago
Many online communities historically have been bigoted and misogynist. If the effect you observe is real, perhaps it's just the reflection of a community that attracted and kept more people over the years because it wasn't (as much) like that?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- projektir 10y ago
  Why are there so few biologically born women in those same communities, then?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- apetresc 10y ago
  I have no direct experience, but I would be surprised if that were true. Emulator development is the perfect intersection of, like, three different communities (low-level tech, video games, and open source) that are (at least on HN) perceived as extra-unwelcoming to women. I don't see why combining all three would cancel that out. I would also note that writing an emulator is not something you just stumble into because the people are friendly or whatever. It requires an extremely honed set of quite niche skills. I think it takes something more to become successful at it than just "I guess I'll stick around because everywhere else is even meaner."

tannhauser23 10y ago

I remember playing this when it came out! It was such a magical moment. It completely blew my mind that there was a SNES Final Fantasy game that we were never meant to play - I think I only found it accidentally when I was browsing ROM sites. I thought it was a homemade hack or something. I never imagined that it was a real game! Haha what a great memory.

jimmies 10y ago

Holy shit, this bring back memories. I did something similar with the Harry Potter series about 15 years ago - beat the publisher to translating the book. Doing that, strangely, is the one event that shaped my life the most. I discovered Harry Potter series up until book 4 (The Globet of Fire) by renting books from a bookstore when I was 15. At that time, many Vietnamese kids were all eager for book 5 to come out. Except for when book 5, The Half-blood Prince came, we had to wait for it. We would have to wait for the "blessed" translator and the publisher to translate and churn out the whole book when a new book comes, and with all the proofreading it would take about 4-6 months. I decided that was too long and started posting on a quite popular forum my indie translation, then moved to my personal website. Being a 16-year-old having a summer break at that time, I had nothing better to do. My timetable was something like stay up all night to translate half a chapter, post the new translation, go to bed at 6 AM, wake up at 11 AM, the next day rinse and repeat. People loved it and many started contacting me to help with the translation. We had a YUUUUGE following to the point that I had to do nothing but just organizing and assigning who-does-what and then proofread it with my 16-year-old brain, but mostly we flew under the radar and it was easy. The complete translated book came out about 20 days after the English version. The normies still had to wait for the blessed book to read it, but anyone who had the Internet already read the whole story months earlier. People would bring A4-sized printouts to read at school and my older brother was asked more than once whether he knew the person who translated it from time to time. Book 6 wasn't a happy story but a fun one. When book 6 came, I knew so much better that I knew to appoint someone that did the logistics for me. I did the fun part, code a website that allows us to automate the translation submission and make sure it can handle the traffic. At that time Vietnam has just signed the Bern copyright convention, and my indie translation was the center of attention. In the past book translation, we gave out our real names or real nick-names, however the translator wanted it. We had about 4-5 chapters churned out before we realized that we were in big troubles. I remember one night I received an email to my personal mailbox at 10 PM from a journalist asking something along the lines of "Do you know you're doing something illegal?" I was scared shitless and fucking deleted everything, thinking this is it - this is the end, and went to bed, not responding to the journalist. Then at 5 AM, not being able to sleep, I checked email again and the same reporter sent another email... "I see that you deleted everything. This is totally not my intention. I won't rat you out. If possible, please let me know if we can do a secret interview. You might think that I am being dishonest but please trust me this time, I want you to continue what you are doing. I hope to see the new chapter coming out tomorrow." I immediately removed all real names and asked everyone on the team to choose a nickname for themselves. I actually gave out my home address to the reporter and he turned out to be a hipster-looking student studying journalism writing part-time for a newspaper. We became good friends after that. Besides the interview, the translation at that time was so controversial that it sparked the discussion whether it is "right" or "wrong" to do on many online forums. I had google analytics at the time so I knew who was linking to the website. I registered a nickname just to talk my side of the story in one of them. It turned out that the admin of the forum was someone who studied in Princeton and three years later, when I dropped out of college, disheartened by what I saw and discouraged by what happened, he asked me to go study abroad. I would otherwise have never dreamt of doing that. Another online friend who is 40+ at that time asked me to work for him in the gap year, appointed me to his "vice-president" role of his company. The rest is just history. Thanks to the event and all that came after it, I knew probably 50% of all online friends that I admire and probably won't ever know otherwise. By the way, when book 7 came out (when I was having my "gap year"), I decided not to do it anymore. It was too much to handle. Someone else I knew did it, though.

borkt 10y ago

I am so happy to see this article. I used to play the Japanese release PSO with Barubary a LOT and heard bits and pieces about the FFV translation. At the time they were at UCI I believe and I was just in 7th grade. Baru always seemed incredibly skilled and was extremely patient with me and helped me learn some basic coding, such as creating custom names for items that worked online. It got me into engineering in general and though I ended up working in Materials Engineering rather than software it was an excellent influence on me and pushed me to learn by reverse engineering. I always imagined Baru would end up somewhere with a career in Video Game development and am thrilled to see it is true.

segmondy 10y ago
I wonder if it's the same barubary. I started a psx dev group in the 90's gridlock. I just finished high school and this kid barubary joined and his work was amazing. Most of us in the scene went into the industry. I didn't cuz I didn't want 80hr weeks.
- gadgetDev 10y ago
  PSX dev was lots of fun and challenging at the time with so little documentation. Still something I'd love to get back to if I have the time. Someone spun up a site a bit ago called psxdev net that's pretty active. Btw, gadget from gridlock :)
  - segmondy 10y ago
    Hey mate!

iaw 10y ago

>“It’s hard to express how big of a deal it was at the time,” Every so often I meet someone who worked on something that was influential on me as a youth. I'm glad I got a chance to read this, playing the rom it was always a mystery where it came from. A lot of us owe Myria a debt of gratitude.

appetizer 10y ago

Also mentioned in the article, but Seiken Densetsu 3 was one of the most fun and amazing games I ever played. I hadn't seen the 'action RPG' style before, and it just added a new level of adrenaline

herval 10y ago

A long time ago, I translated Civilization 1 to Brazilian Portuguese. Eventually (like, 15 years later?) I got to work for a guy that worked on CIV I, and he told me they just found my translation, fixed some stuff and put it up as the official one (I put it in the most popular BBS at the time) Good times.

shriphani 10y ago

I love stories like this - right from Sneferu in ancient Egypt to a driven high-schooler - drive leads people to great things. And when we see the output we are just left to wonder what fueled it and how we can harness that same drive.

gregpardo 10y ago

I learned how to program in the Rom Hacking scene and was involved with a team that released 4 patches for games. The amount of dedication and hours our team put in was incredible. I think I managed around 30-40 hours with high-school. Also, a lot of the reasons some games never made it stateside or came way late was often financial or political. The US versions of these companies often ran slightly independent from the Japanese game studios and the RPG adoption was not huge in the early console days here yet.

roflchoppa 10y ago

reading about how all these guys were meeting up in IRC's just to hang out makes me miss the old web. Anyone know any welcoming IRCs?

ABCLAW 10y ago

Projects like this caused me to fall in love with tech as a kid, and my subsequent career arc was largely premised on the notion "how do we bring this type of amazing innovation into safe legal waters and allow it to flourish". I played FFV. I played a ton of fan translations. Heck, I completed the entire SNES rpg catalog, both JP and ENG. Thanks for sharing this. ~~~ Re: Translation and Fan-mods in general. Many game developers fail to recognize that their works inadvertently become platforms, and that the platformization of stellar works is both the cause and effect of their spectacular success. There are a ton of crystal clear examples of this phenomenon. Unfortunately it is tremendously common that developers and publishers chop their own legs out from under them when attempting to re-seize control of these platforms to monetize them. Often their attempts destroy value, and terminally damage their brands.

derefr 10y ago
What good is brand value if you can't monetize any of it?
- toyg 10y ago
  There are ways to monetize in a respectful way - for example, by making new games in the universe that your previous "platform" made so popular. You don't have to nickle & dime all the time to make a buck.
- ABCLAW 10y ago
  There's a false dilemma stemming out of the word "any". In reality there's an equilibrium between giving and taking. If you don't monetize enough, you can't stay afloat as a developer and you're left with a brand asset for sale upon liquidation. If you take control of community produced goods in order to take the entire pie for yourself, your fanbase will slow or stop producing incidental free value for your projects and your core evangelists will begin jumping ship to greener pastures. This doesn't kill you immediately, but it also doesn't position you for long term growth.

gumby 10y ago

title should be "...Square Enix and...". The company "Square" ≠ "Square Enix"

DerekL 10y ago
No, the article is correct. This was before the merger with Enix, and the company was called “Square”, and sometimes used the name “Squaresoft”.
- gumby 10y ago
  Thanks
  - Icerain 10y ago
    Squaresoft was the american subsidiary. The name didn't came out of nowhere