ot long ago, the face of the video game industry had a form far different than what we see today. During the years leading up to the current console generation, Japan ran the show, leaving Western gamers at the mercy of sluggish localizations and with no choice but to read and re-read import coverage as they waited impatiently for killer titles to trickle overseas. Even landmark, blockbuster games like Final Fantasy VII took their time in making the transition to English; nine months separated the Japanese and American releases of the franchise's 32-bit debut, an unthinkable delay today.
Those unwilling to wait for Japan's best and brightest to arrive through the proper channels often resorted to craftier means. Importing, though often prohibitively expensive, allowed gamers to play the same titles that publishers were readying for English shores -- provided they made the proper modifications to their consoles. But these folks clearly made up the minority, as most video game enthusiasts lacked the budget and fortitude to slowly plod through an expensive import game with a kanji dictionary always at the ready.
For most of us, these Japanese games were a complete mystery until they showed up on the shelves of our local game stores -- and if they never made it, well, these lost titles would remain a mystery forever, the object of both speculation and wonder.
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But this dark age didn't last long. In October of 1997, an ambitious translation group led by a mysterious programmer nicknamed "Shadow" created not the first, but the first truly notable fan-made video game translation. Through clever manipulation of Final Fantasy V's ROM (essentially, a digital copy), Shadow and his gang replaced the game's Japanese text with their own fully-translated English script, marking the first time this title would be playable in English -- and beating Square's own efforts by two years.
While of dubious legality, the Final Fantasy V translation showed the potential for ROM hacking. Hundreds (if not thousands) of games could now be played in English, though this hopeful prediction rested entirely in the hands of selfless programmers and enthusiasts willing to give up countless hours of their free time for a pro bono job.
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Tomato
Clyde Mandelin, known as "Tomato" in the ROM hacking scene, took his initial inspiration from RPGe's Final Fantasy V and the equally-impressive translation patch for Seiken Densetsu 3, which followed a few years later. After dabbling a bit with text and graphics hacking, Clyde went on to create a suite of EarthBound-hacking tools known as PK Hack in 2000. Since then, Mandelin's had his hand in a number of translations -- along with the popular Earthbound community, Starmen.net -- but none of his work has received quite as much attention as the Mother 3 translation, released in October of 2008.
It's safe to say that no other game in the history of time garnered such a rabid demand for translation; by the time Nintendo made it clear that they had no intention in bringing this late-era Game Boy Advance title to America, Mandelin (assisted by a handful of Mother 3 fanatics) found himself hard at work on making this uniquely brilliant game playable for an English speaking audience. But Mandelin's efforts went far beyond a simple translation; he sought to capture the spirit of the Mother series' idiosyncratic creator, along with the colorful nature of the SNES Earthbound translation. "We wanted to do the game justice and make something on par with what an official English release might've been like," says Mandelin. "I think we came close to that and made a lot of fans happy with how it turned out."
Not being a writer himself, Mandelin at first struggled with the monumental task (and equally monumental expectations) of a Mother 3 translation, but this learning process gave him a greater respect for good writers -- especially game writers. According to Mandelin, "With Mother 3, one of the hardest parts of the translation was trying to keep the same text feel and flow as the original game. The game was written by Shigesato Itoi, who's considered a very good, creative writer. But the act of translating anything usually distorts or destroys a lot in the original text. Usually it doesn't matter in games because game text is usually pretty dry and purely functional."
It's hard to find anyone who would fault Mandelin's Mother 3 translation for its lack of faithfulness; an impressive feat when dealing with a community that expects nothing less than perfection with the franchise. But Mandelin's talents extend beyond the fan translation scene, as he's had his share of translation credits on retail-released anime and video game titles. Yet even after being fairly compensated for his efforts in an official capacity, Mandelin's passion for the scene hasn't died.
"I wish I could start a company and translate a lot of niche titles like these officially," says Mandelin. "Even if they earned just enough to break even each time, I think it'd be a lot of fun, and it'd let a bunch of us ROM hackers and translators do what we like for a living."
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Neill Corlett
Like Mandelin, fellow ROM hacker Neill Corlett also jumped into the translation scene thanks to Shadow's Final Fantasy V patch. "RPGe's Final Fantasy V was the proof of concept that a group of fans could realistically get together and translate an entire RPG, from scratch, without the source code," says Corlett.
Corlett spent early 1998 tinkering with Seiken Densetsu 3, the Super Famicom Secret of Mana sequel that tortured American Square fans with its utter lack of retail presence in the States. Due to the complicated nature of text storage in the SD3 ROM and Corlett's own lack of Japanese knowledge, the budding hacker soon found himself enlisting the help of fellow Mana fans to give this sequel a worthy English translation.
But, as Corlett explains, tackling this complex Super Famicom title took years of work and an abundance of programming know-how: "From an organizational perspective, the project involved distributing, collecting and editing the work of three dedicated translators: SoM2Freak, Lina`chan, and Nuku-nuku. Combined, they translated over 300K of text, about the same as a small novel. From a technical perspective, the game used sophisticated compression and a built-in scripting system which was almost as complex as a Java virtual machine. It took me from about April to October 1998 to reverse engineer the game, write the assembly code to patch it, and dump the script and item text for translation."
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By August of 2000, Corlett and company's work had finally paid off, exposing Seiken Densetsu 3 -- widely considered to be the last great Mana game -- to an audience that had previously only dreamt of playing it. To this day, Corlett's patch remains the only way to play SD3 in English.
Being a major player in the early days of the ROM translation scene, Corlett holds a certain fondness for those days when anything seemed possible. "There was a large body of great-but-obscure Japanese games, and the technology that allowed fans to translate them -- widespread Internet access, easy availability of ROMs, emulators and disassemblers -- were relatively new," says Corlett.
While Corlett has since moved on from the ROM translation scene to a programming career at Sony's SNEI division in San Francisco, he occasionally keeps an eye on fan translations, noting Gideon Zhi's La Mulana as proof that the scene can still impress long after those exciting early years. But even with the scene still thriving, Corlett sees future roadblocks in the DRM on the current generation of consoles. "I feel that writing your own code for a hardware device that you've bought is an inalienable right," says Corlett. "The fan translation scene could never have existed if the NES, SNES and PSX had suffered from the same restrictions as the PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii, and I know I'm not alone in thinking we'd be worse off."
Gideon Zhi
If you played and enjoyed the throwback platformer Cave Story on WiiWare, you can thank Gideon Zhi; while he didn't have a hand in the creation or the official Nicalis release of this amazing little Metroid-inspired game, his original 2004 fan translation of the PC freeware version put Cave Story on the map for English-speaking gamers. But Zhi didn't rest on his laurels after the amazing success of Cave Story; to this day, he remains one of the most prolific and productive members of the ROM translation scene, with a total of 71 completed projects (and another 36 in the works) available at his home page, Aeon Genesis Translations.
Unsurprisingly, Zhi's fascination with ROM hacking can be traced to what's clearly the touchstone for the scene, RPGe's Final Fantasy V translation. "I got into emulation in the mid-to-late 1990s, and through some happy accident discovered work-in-progress versions of Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy II (the NES one.)," says Zhi. "I watched for about a year, saw some groups come and go, and decided that it was time to give back. I picked up a few games with very little text and thought they'd be 'easy.' Hah! How wrong I was. I got them done eventually, but it took a few years. I picked up other things in the meantime, easier things to learn on."
Being part of the translation scene since the late '90s, Zhi recalls the excitement of the scene's early years: "At the time there were so many groups and so many projects in progress that there'd be a constant flow of project updates to the news portals, and I always got this little tingly feeling whenever such an update went live." But these good times didn't come without struggle, whether from inter-scene disputes or seemingly unhackable games. Some of Zhi's most impressive work can be found in titles that possibly never made it over here due to the sheer amount of re-programming needed to make these games suitable for an English-speaking audience. Treasure of the Rudras, a 1996 Square Super Famicom RPG, marked one of Zhi's greatest challenges.
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The biggest hurdle in translating Rudras can be found in its unique magic system in which spells are generated based on textual input from the player; so "FLARE" would produce a fire spell, "MEGAFLARE" would produce a more powerful fire spell, and "ALLMEGAFLARE" would change the targeting of the spell to affect all enemies. Forcing this interesting system around the mechanics of a very different language may be Zhi's greatest fan translation feat.
"Problems arise when you consider that each character in Japanese is a syllable and not a letter -- it takes about twelve roman letters to produce as much linguistic sound as it does six Japanese characters," says Zhi. "Rendering this system into English required translating the word database, which was one thing, but it also involved letting the user input longer words. Letting the user input longer words means that I needed to find extra RAM space to store those longer words, not to mention extra space in the save files. It also meant reprogramming menu interfaces so that the new spell names wouldn't spill out of windows; in some cases, this meant reprogramming cursor behavior in some menus. All told, it took a full week of long days to get the new system up and running."
Gideon may have other interests -- at the moment, he's shopping around a manuscript for a young adult novel -- but ROM translation is still a major part of his life; at the moment, he's hoping to complete six projects by the end of the year. With his ardent devotion to the translation scene, Gideon's unlikely to disappoint on this prediction anytime soon.
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Demi
While most ROM translation enthusiasts cite RPGe's Final Fantasy V translation as their initial inspiration, Steve Demeter got his foot in the door a bit earlier. After dabbling with the sudden surge of reliable console emulators that hit the Internet in the mid-90s, Demeter began to discover an entire world of games previously inaccessible to him; in particular, the Japanese version of Final Fantasy II pushed Demeter's fascination with Japanese games into a genuine curiosity about the possibility of ROM translation. After passing on Final Fantasy V due to his beginner status at ROM hacking, Demeter instead opted for the less-complex Final Fantasy II; and in 1998, his group Neo Demiforce released the first complete translation of this previously-unseen-in-the-states Final Fantasy game --nearly five years before Square would officially release it for the first time in English with Final Fantasy Origins.
As a veteran who saw action during the earliest days of ROM translation, Demeter -- known as "Demi" during his ROM hacking tenure -- has his fingerprints on some of the most exciting events and releases to emerge from the scene. Without Neo Demiforce, it's unlikely that Nintendo's scrapped translation of the first NES Mother game would have seen life outside of clandestine Internet auctions; after discovering the existence of a translated prototype cartridge, Demeter -- with the help of some devoted fans -- raised the funds necessary to procure this amazing find. After a few copy-protection hacks, Neo Demiforce released the translated Mother ROM -- adding a "Zero" to the game's original name of "Earthbound" -- to the Internet in 1998, satisfying franchise fans desperate for a way to play the lost chapter of their favorite series.
Fittingly, Neo Demiforce's other groundbreaking release took the form of a popular franchise installment that never made it to the States -- and unfortunately, this one wasn't found previously-translated. Radical Dreamers, the odd Chrono Trigger follow-up released exclusively for the Japanese Satellaview Super Famicom download service, taunted Chrono fans with its status as the text-based inspiration for Chrono Cross. But, through the efforts of Demeter and a few other talented individuals, this Chrono side-story was reworked into English and released to the public in 2005. To this day, Demeter still considers Radical Dreamers to be his most creatively successful project.
"The majority of projects I'd worked on had intermittent text in incidental areas, but this game was all text (similar to a 'Choose Your Own Adventure' book)," says Demeter. "There were around 700 pages of text and it was painstaking work to make all of it flow together well. It felt great once it was finally released, to know I had accomplished something like that... I felt like I could write a book of my own at that point."
Following the release of Radical Dreamers, Demeter has since focused his talents on game development; recently, his iPhone-exclusive Trism picked up a lot of buzz for standing out as a unique entry in the crowded portable puzzle game market. Still, Demeter hasn't forgotten his programming roots in ROM translation; reflecting on the beginning of his ROM hacking days, he cites a struggle with changing a game's title screen as the first step to a life-changing epiphany. During a late night hacking session, Demeter finally achieved his intended results by altering two mere bytes of data, and in doing so, gained a new perspective -- though not just on programming.
"...It struck me that I was actually exploring for the first time in my life. I was venturing out there, beyond what anyone had ever intended me to see," says Demeter. "It felt different -- it felt like my life had been a game up until this point. That feeling... I chase that feeling to this day. It's an incredibly powerful thing to be awakened to, and I'm glad hacking was able to open my eyes about it.
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Nightcrawler
The desire to make his own game drove ROM hacker "Nightcrawler" into the scene. Picking up on the mid-90s trend of repurposing ROMs of Super Mario Bros., Nightcrawler made "Quest for the Missing Hat," his own version of Nintendo's franchise-forming game. But unlike the hundreds of graphical Mario hacks out there, Nightcrawler's was different; after stumbling across some notes about text alteration, he decided his take on Super Mario would be one of the few to alter all of the game's brief instances of dialogue. With this novelty showing him the potential for ROM translation, in 1997 Nightcrawler established his own group, Translation Corporation - which is still active to this day.
As someone who's been around since the infancy of ROM translation, Nightcrawler still holds many fond memories of a time when "information was spreading like never before." He continues," Being amongst the first to discover new things and new methods is a great feeling. It was a booming and unique time period for emulation and ROM hacking. Though the community is still very active today, the days of massive influx of people, large collaborations, and frequent new discoveries remains left to the '90s."
Though this amazing time wasn't completely lacking in conflict, as Nightcrawler explains: "The ROM hacking community was largely led by teenagers at the time and could not escape teenage drama. Competition turned bad, accusations of stolen work, and other childish activity was frequent. Thankfully, much of that has dissipated today, but the community still struggles at times with drama and politics, and can never escape it's own history."
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While most of our featured ROM translators' work can be found nested in popular franchises -- your Chronos, your Final Fantasies, your Earthbounds -- Nightcrawler's passion lies in titles that are far more obscure. Dual Orb 2, a Japanese-only sequel to a similarly Japanese-only game, remains his favorite project, largely for very personal reasons; Nightcrawler's work on this game marks his return to ROM translation after a car accident incapacitated him for a year, causing work on a planned Final Fantasy III translation to grind to a halt.
"Dual Orb 2 was a labor of love that I continue to periodically enhance every few years," says Nightcrawler. "It's a project that never seems to end for me. I predict I will further improve or enhance the project again some day. It was also released at the tail end of the era of ROM hacking as I knew it from the 90s. As a result, it received the most fanfare and recognition. There is certainly much less fanfare and interest from the general populace today."
Still, even with the most exciting days of the ROM translation scene behind him, Nightcrawler still holds hope for the future. "I think the ROM translation community is doing just fine and as healthy as ever," he says "Over the years we've gone through some different eras, and times certainly have changed, but we're probably seeing more top quality work today than ever before." And you only have to look at the front page of romhacking.net to verify Nightcrawler's claims; if a game's out there, in demand, and from Japan, someone's working thanklessly so we Japanese-challenged can play it.
Found in Translation: Inside the Noble Art of ROM Hacking from 1UP.com
The cat knows this is an extremely long article but it is VERY interesting how long people have been hacking the ROMs and translating the games so that people can enjoy them. The cat recommends you to take your time to read this and enjoy it.
Especially those of you who grew up during the time when "all the good video games come from Japan"