"Professor! The beauty of your legs exceeds my calculations."
A Namco ad from the mid-Eighties, spotted in the pages of a trade magazine for toy industry members. I'm not sure what this ad was intended to convey, but it does a good job of showcasing the company's motto of the era, which was "We Create 'Play.'" Ahem.
Local heroes take Japanese video games to the world (Japan Times)
Although it's sad (but true) this article begins with the words "Japan may not be the all-conquering video-game powerhouse it once was," it's a nice profile of both my company, AltJapan Co., Ltd., and several other localization industry players. Thanks to the Japan Times for the coverage!
I don't talk much about games here because I like to at least try and keep my professional and personal lives separate, but it's hard to believe its been well over a decade since Hiroko and I started translating video games professionally. Today "localization" is a buzzword. It's a given that video games need to be carefully translated and re-written to match their local audiences. I run into young college grads who enthuse about getting into it as a career all the time.
But just ten years back, you could practically count the number of people who even knew what the word "localization" meant on two hands. Only a handful of people actually specialized in it full-time. It was a sort of Wild West, with everyone from producers to freelancers making the rules and conventions up as they went along. The luckiest worked in-house at big game companies; my college buddy Alex Smith was one, and his tales of work at Squaresoft (now Square-Enix) inspired me to get off my duff at the Patent and Trademark Office, where I was working as a technical translator, and take the plunge into games.
Hiroko and I finally got our chance in 1998, introduced to a client by mutual friend and anime-translation legend Michael House. It was a cult-hit platformer ("platform game" being the term for Super Mario-style side-scrolling action game) by the name of Silhouette Mirage, published in the US by the late, lamented Working Designs. (This link represents the first time I've ever actually laid eyes on the finished product!)
Hiroko and I were living in Washington DC at the time, and actually printed out the code on the trusty old dot matrix printer, wrote out translations in longhand while eating at the local pizza parlor, and then inputted the English back into the master file back at home. Today, Excel is pretty much the industry standard for localization files, and you go for pizza after you're done working for the day. How times change.
We'd go on to work on Lunar: Silver Star Story for WD and then a whole host of other titles for various agencies before deciding to found our own company. We hired an attorney to file the paperwork, commissioned a logo from my pal Alen Yen, and printed up business cards. That was back in 2001. Talk about a Space Odyssey of sorts.
Oldie but goodie from Japan's infamous 2ch boards: a handy guide to why the dating sim videogame Love Plus is better than any real-life relationship. No wonder that birth rate is declining!
Totally awesome. Am I the only one who's amazed Atari was still making 7800 games as late as 1990!?
"Why is Japan so behind the curve when it comes to game development?" asks this thread on 2ch. "Is it because we have less financial resources than foreign game companies? Because we don't rely on engines like they do? Because our planners (directors) aren't skilled programmers? Why?"
Some answers put forth by totally anonymous readers are below. The interesting thing is how many of them echo similar complaints from foreign gamers: an over-focus on the niche otaku demographic, unprofessional storytelling, etc. Personally, I tend to agree with the guys who say Japan needs to turn its so-called disadvantages into assets, but then again, I'm an optimistic kind of guy. Here we go:
-Japanese game developers are born and raised and live in Japan. With games, with art, with otaku culture, and more, we have a distinct background and history. In the future we're going to have to make that a sales point, or find a way to "mine" it. For example, we'll never beat Asia when it comes to the cost performance of rendering realistic-looking graphics. But when it comes to "stylized" (deforume) stuff we can't be beaten.
-Abroad, university grads, grad school grads, and even PhDs make games. The vast majority of Japanese game industry people have a university degree or some game-design school diploma at best. There's no way we can win.
-Japanese game scenarios are the pits. We may be behind in graphics but that isn't a problem so long as they're fun and interesting. The problem is that teams can't focus when they have to carry through a crappy scenario to its end. I don't know whether to describe them as "childish" or "otaku-oriented" or what but a lot of games are just too ludicrous for adults to appreciate.
-A lot of foreign game companies hire pro screenwriters. Here we leave this critical part of the process to directors and programmers and other amateurs.
-The PS1 era had a lot of cool and lighthearted games, but starting with the PS2 "otaku games" became the norm.
-I find it really strange that in an era when we know foreign gamers love first-person shooters that not a single domestic company has even tried to make one.
-The problem isn't a lack of education or technical skill. Believe me there are plenty of over-educated dudes in this industry. The problem is the total lack of ability of management. But you could say that about Japanese businesses across the board.
-We may be behind the curve in some respects, but answer me this: is there any country out there that can beat Japan when it comes to ero-games?
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