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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's about the same as how you'd approach modern programming, except instead of watching variables you'd watch registers and addresses in RAM/VRAM and work backward from there. Hell, you could even look specifically for instructions that manipulated those addresses.
>“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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This reminds me somewhat of translations of Chinese webnovels. Many of them have hundreds or thousands of chapters, but never see an official English release, so fans would spend years of time translating them and posting them online. I believe one of the most well-known sites for this (wuxiaworld) has actually attained international recognition (ie. been in the news) for it, as well as signed an agreement with the major Chinese publisher of webnovels to continue translating in a legal manner.
> 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?"
What illegal thing were you doing? If Terry Brooks can translate Tolkien from English to English without running afoul of copyright, I don't see what copyright would have to say about translating from English to Vietnamese. You're certainly not infringing on the author's original wording.
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!
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."
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.
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.
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.
Intuitively i'd guess it's something to do with the way children are 'socialised'.
It seems very common for children living as boys to immerse themselves in video games and computers if they're dealing with social isolation or anxiety/depression. It's almost actively encouraged for them to do so — their parents and teachers treat it as normal, most of their male class mates dabble in it, and when i was growing up in the '90s at least video games and computers were depicted almost exclusively as the realm of boys. For trans people in particular i imagine the (semi-)anonymous community aspect also offers some degree of freedom of expression/identity that they often don't have in real life.
Children living as girls are not encouraged to get into games and computers to anywhere near the same degree, and for historical reasons they don't really have anyone to look to as an example or role model in that space.
I've noticed that all of the trans women i've heard of who had supportive parents and were able to start living as girls early on aren't really interested in games or computers. Admittedly, it's a very very small sample size filtered through the lens of what the mass media consider interesting — Jazz Jennings, that girl from Germany, and a few others — but it's a pattern i've seen anyway.
I was an awkward kid with few friends, and turned to computers because they were fascinating and more fun than interacting with people.
Could be that people with [insert unusual trait here] are naturally drawn to computers for similar reasons, be they autistic, transgendered, disabled, or just plain weird.
Anecdotally, I was also a member of a small, online, gaming focused community for a long time. It wasn't as directly tied to emulator/roms, but there was definitely a focus on Japanese console games. Over the years, a number of those members have come out as transgender, which has similarly made me wonder what it was about that community that attracted so many people that probably felt ostracized in real life.
In tech in general. The thing that seems most particular about games is the preference for pseudonyms, usually picked from game lore. There was an interesting talk during Pycon 2014 about being transgender in tech:
If you check the Filfre.net series of articles, you will find that a number of people involved in early game development would change gender later in life.
On a different note, manga and anime seems to more often have protagonists of diffuse gender by western norms.
A similar observation on my part that corroborates this: as I started reading the piece, saw that the hacker being interviewed (Myria) was described as female, my immediate intuition (while knowing no other details about the person) was that she was rather more likely to be transgender than biologically-born female.
Similar to you, I have little provable intuition as to why this correlation apparently exists, though.
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?
I would guess that communities of introverts are more likely to commit acts that are deemed socially unacceptable, or at least socially disparaging. Could it just be easier to express yourself in such a community?
I didn't notice that the subject was trans-gender until I read your comment. It's good that the article doesn't highlight the fact: as soon as someone is presented as transgender, this trait becomes their principal trait, even if they have other interesting accomplishments.
[+] [-] herval|9 years ago|reply
Good times.
[+] [-] soylentcola|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dlevine|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ABCLAW|9 years ago|reply
~~~
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|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] luckyt|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angrycoder|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] slinkyavenger|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iaw|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] FullMtlAlcoholc|9 years ago|reply
To this day, I still choose Japanese audio for games if available.
[+] [-] Kurtz79|9 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] austinpray|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rpazyaquian|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brilliantcode|9 years ago|reply
Our drivers were different but you actually produced a patch enjoyed by a lot of j-RPG fans that came
[+] [-] borkt|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] segmondy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tannhauser23|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimmies|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] notamy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pm90|9 years ago|reply
small nitpick: book 5 was Order of the Phoenix.
[+] [-] maaaats|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|9 years ago|reply
What illegal thing were you doing? If Terry Brooks can translate Tolkien from English to English without running afoul of copyright, I don't see what copyright would have to say about translating from English to Vietnamese. You're certainly not infringing on the author's original wording.
[+] [-] smaili|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] gregpardo|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shriphani|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gumby|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DerekL|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roflchoppa|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apetresc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] okdana|9 years ago|reply
It seems very common for children living as boys to immerse themselves in video games and computers if they're dealing with social isolation or anxiety/depression. It's almost actively encouraged for them to do so — their parents and teachers treat it as normal, most of their male class mates dabble in it, and when i was growing up in the '90s at least video games and computers were depicted almost exclusively as the realm of boys. For trans people in particular i imagine the (semi-)anonymous community aspect also offers some degree of freedom of expression/identity that they often don't have in real life.
Children living as girls are not encouraged to get into games and computers to anywhere near the same degree, and for historical reasons they don't really have anyone to look to as an example or role model in that space.
I've noticed that all of the trans women i've heard of who had supportive parents and were able to start living as girls early on aren't really interested in games or computers. Admittedly, it's a very very small sample size filtered through the lens of what the mass media consider interesting — Jazz Jennings, that girl from Germany, and a few others — but it's a pattern i've seen anyway.
[+] [-] umbrai_nation|9 years ago|reply
Could be that people with [insert unusual trait here] are naturally drawn to computers for similar reasons, be they autistic, transgendered, disabled, or just plain weird.
[+] [-] yannyu|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jordigh|9 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4R6FXtZl154
[+] [-] digi_owl|9 years ago|reply
On a different note, manga and anime seems to more often have protagonists of diffuse gender by western norms.
[+] [-] rkapsoro|9 years ago|reply
Similar to you, I have little provable intuition as to why this correlation apparently exists, though.
[+] [-] ska|9 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] ben_jones|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] luckyt|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] appetizer|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]