The very serious part-time unofficial hobby of videogame fan-translation

Hi.

A couple of things have happened in the “scene” that prompted me to make this writeup, and I’m probably overdue in talking about a lot of this.

First of all, we’re coming up on the 5th anniversary of my first English patch. Dr. Slump released on May 8th, 2021. Goddamn. I have to thank covid and unemployment because without the years of free time and triple-extended unemployment payments I would never have had the idle time to teach myself all the skills and slowly chip away at the game’s technical barriers. At the time there was very little in terms of resources, all I really had was a writeup from Slowbeef who did the programming on the Policenauts fan-translation. PS1 wasn’t nearly as hot a spot for fan-translations as it seems to be now. But it was so fun! You really feel like a cool hacker doing this, trying to suss out the intentions of a programmer from 25 years ago by divining hex numbers and staring at assembly runes. You better believe that I mentally go “I’m in” every time I defeat a piece of security or proprietary file format. I love this shit. There aren’t a lot of spaces where you can do this with a fun, safe, rewarding, and noble goal in mind. Everyone I know that has a job in reverse-engineering works for a government organization, and really, what is there to hack that’s fun besides video games? Even then you’re liable to get sued if you try to hack a modern game.

I did not expect that hacking and translating a game would get me “clout” or “success”. What I wanted out of Dr. Slump was for beautiful low-poly non-texture-filtered 3D models with hand-painted expressions to make a comeback, and for people to look to that game for inspiration. I wanted this because I love games like it and Mega Man Legends and I want people to see that this artstyle still totally holds up and can work today. And then it kind of worked?!? I see that style everywhere now, from indie games to Vtubers to artists and more. I’m not saying it was because of me, but I certainly do feel vindicated in liking it! I also have another passion in life, and that is the wonderful world of video game marketing and promotion. I really felt like these games could get a lot more attention than they get but that they need someone to succinctly demonstrate their strengths in a digestible format. It’s nothing new, I’m just talking about video game trailers. But when it comes to old obscure games most of what you find are short gifs or multi-hour video essays, with not a lot of traditional middle-ground. I mean, why would you make a trailer for a game that’s been out for decades? I want people to SEE what it is that’s so special about them, for people to see why I love these games so much. So I made a trailer for Dr. Slump and continue to make trailers for most of our projects. It turns out the format is very convenient for sharing and it occupies a payload size that makes a lot of websites want to cover it.

As a result…I did get a modicum of internet celebrity. And internet money! My Patreon was doing numbers! It was far, far less than minimum wage considering the time I was putting into it but hey, getting anything is a signifier of success. I think a lot of people, especially in places with lower average income, would be very happy with that money. At the time I was also making tutorial videos on how to program translation patches and I was getting a lot of positive messages from people saying how invaluable they were. I was able to attract a team of very cool and talented people to tackle Racing Lagoon together. Websites and publications were reaching out for interviews. I was being recognized in Twitch chats. The work I did on these games eventually led to me getting a cool job (which I still can’t talk about). I got to make a pitch for an official retro localization and direct it through to realization and release. It took very, very, very, very much hard work and commitment, but I turned fan-translation into a career and success. In the modern attention economy and the machinations of social media, that means I also gained something called “clout”. To be honest, it isn’t something I care about very much. I don’t make opinionated posts about The Way I Want Videogames To Be or any such complaining. What I do want is to prop up these obscure games that I like and to be able to talk to people about them and share what makes them unique and interesting. Yeah, I’ll admit I did put my branding on my projects but I was proud of them. I wanted people to be able to see my logo and know they were getting something that at least strived to be professional quality.

Which brings us to today and…things feel different. Fan-translation, long thought to be one of the most thankless and altruistic endeavors in gaming, is now attracting many more people in what feels like a goldrush. I do feel at least a little at fault here but I know there’s more to it than that. Maybe I did make it look a little glamorous, maybe I made the incentives too apparent. Wowie, you too can stare at a hex editor for endless hours making less than minimum wage! But it isn’t just the money. It comes back to clout. People want to feel important, popular, relied on, thanked, appreciated, accomplished, 「R」espected. I get it. Of course, a lot of people do this because truly, they are fans of a game and don’t need anything else. That is where this all started of course, me included! Though I do feel like the “fan” part of this hobby is sort of slowly fading into the distance. More and more I’m seeing solo programmers with no Japanese experience try to pick up a game to hack it, and I have to ask myself “What’s the motivation?” I’m sure they think the game is cool on some level, but they couldn’t have really experienced for themselves. I think it’s great that people want to build their skills and get involved but the results of this…are not the best for reasons I will get to later. The “niche old Japan-only game” scene is also getting a lot more attention nowadays from “content creators”. Someone can skim the Wikipedia page on a game and then Google translate a playthrough of it and then put out an hour-long video with the title “ThE MoSt FuCkeD uP Ps1 GaMe tHaT YoU NeVeR HeArD aBoUt!” and rake in hundreds of thousands of views, it feels like. And then in turn it creates people who want to “step up” and “be the hero” that releases the English patch for that game. It’s all just content to be chewed up and spat out and re-chewed blah blah blah you know how Youtube works. I’m really not trying to put down everyone who covers games on Youtube or anything like that, it’s just that some of these channels have actually hurt people that I’ve worked with. These older and obscure games have a LOT of misinformation surrounding them and the Youtube side of the goldrush isn’t really helping. People STILL say Aconcagua was Sony’s legitimate attempt to break into the Argentinian game market based on an offhand joke that a game journalist made decades ago!

Ok, I put it off long enough. I can’t go any longer without addressing the elephant in the room. AI is here now. AI feels like it was tailor made to “disrupt” the fan-translation scene. It can vibe code your translation tools for you. It can vibe analyse game data. It can vibe edit textures and audio. And of course, it can vibe translate for you. If you’re a solo programmer, no longer do you have to expose yourself to a public forum to ask for translators. No longer do you have to learn how to collaborate. No longer do you have to form bonds with people. The quality will be bad but who cares, right? I mean, it’s better than nothing, right? Someone else will clean up my mess when I upload the tools, right? In reality, that doesn’t happen. The moment has passed. It’s how the attention economy works. Hope you enjoyed your article on TimeExtension.com. Translators/localizers, also, DO NOT ENJOY cleaning up machine translation. It does not save time or offer anything of value if every single line needs to be double-checked and re-translated and it reduces the optics of their job to that of “text janitor.” Real translators have been kicked so hard by AI that you should not blame them for not picking up the sloppy seconds of a chatGPT translation patch. They deserve better. Now that fan-translation can be done by one bored person who doesn’t have to commit very much time or effort, yeah you’re gonna see a lot of AI fan-translation patches. Did you know that a patch for Bokura no Kazoku was released? I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t because it’s an incomplete MTL that crashes 5 minutes in. That didn’t stop it from being released! Did that person get what they wanted out of this? I have no idea!

Which brings us to the big recent news. Segagaga’s long, long awaited English patch finally released after decades of anticipation, with the news that large parts of the translation is edited MTL. Frankly, I’m just as confused as you are. I hyped up the patch before release, but I had no idea. The hosts of the show that announced the patch had no idea! It was in the works for so long that nobody would have guessed that any shortcuts were being taken. The patch was talked about only in hushed whispers, a clandestine project that we were assured was being worked on by Top Men. I mean, it’s Segagaga for crying out loud! I run a form where people can submit requests for English patches (not a popularity contest by the way, I like being clued in on cool niche games I don’t know about) and Segagaga is far and away the #1 request. It’s not a game I was ever going to tackle because I’m not the diehard Sega fan that you need to be to translate it, but it looks like that job went first to AI, to some very mixed results. What was going to be a triumphant moment of celebration became “nothing to see here, folks” for what seems like most people. In some cursory searches it seems like the game didn’t exactly explode in terms of coverage the way it should have. It’s a shame, now I’m not sure if it ever will. Maybe if it was disclosed beforehand things would have gone over better. I hate that I now have to triple-vet and verify every other community project before I “endorse” it with a retweet.

I’ve gone a long time without talking about how I translate game text. I don’t mean within this writeup, I mean ever. I’ve published several videos on the technical side of fan-translation and a big fat zero on the actual art of localization. The reason for this is very simple: I don’t want to deal with social media localization piranhas. There has never been a time more hostile to localizers with the entire industry in chaos over being replaced with AI, uprisings against “wokealizers”, and every possible excuse to raise controversy where it doesn’t exist. How bad is it, you ask? In my recent romhacking video I used a thumbnail with the simplest, most direct translation I could find in the script, specifically so that nobody could complain. The line was:

友枝小学校の４年生

I’m a 4th-grader at Tomoeda Elementary.

I really want to emphasize that this is a completely direct translation. Any change to it at all would make it worse. But was it good enough for the piranhas? Fuck no! Believe it or not, someone showed up in the replies and tried to argue that the order of the words should be 100% preserved through translation and that it should be the perfectly SOVLfully accurate:

At Tomoeda Elementary I am a 4th grader.

Amazing. No notes. So yeah, I don’t talk about localization. But I guess now is as good a time as any. I guess I don’t have much insightful to say. I take the original line and extract its meaning, then try to process how the character would verbalize it, with just a hint of that jaggy PS1/PS2 “flavor” to make concise, memorable lines that the player won’t just mash through. Other than that, it helps to have the entire context of the game in your head at all times so you know when things should be called back to and you know exactly what the player is doing and what their needs are at any moment. The goal is to make the English player feel exactly the same as the Japanese player reading those lines. So yeah, normal stuff. My heart goes out to anyone that relies on localization for their livelihood.

I wish I could end this on any sort of positive note but it’s 2026 and things don’t get better over time. I’m going to continue to do things the way I do them, and challenge myself to expand the scope and quality of my work. There’s a lot of projects that we have cooking. Believe me, none of them have been abandoned. I have been vibrating with anticipation for people to finally experience the wonder that is Rowdy Princess since we announced it. I’m working on another PS2 game where I’ve added a bonifide high-falutin’ 60FPS option that makes the game sing. I’m also far from the only person translating without MTL. Please follow people like SnowyAria and Cargodin and Aquagon and many others. There’s a tendency to describe a game as being translated by “the fans” without crediting the actual people who did it. Look up who translated the patches that you’ve played and show them how much you appreciate them because a lot of them don’t feel very appreciated right now.

-Hilltop