For most of the 1980s and 1990s, many of the best Japanese role-playing games never left Japan. Publishers passed over many games as, in Edge’s words, “too complicated, weird or leftfield for western minds”. Fans who had imported the games, or later played them on emulators, decided to translate them themselves. They dug the text out of the game’s data, translated it and squeezed it back in, and shared the result as a small patch file that turned a Japanese game into an English one.
Retro Gamer called them “ragtag teams of guerrilla ROM hackers and translators”. In 2006 it counted “close to a thousand” translation patches, “for nearly every single games system ever”. Their work gave English-speaking players Final Fantasy V two years before Square’s own translation, Seiken Densetsu 3 nineteen years before, and Mother 3, which Nintendo had still not released in English when Wireframe wrote about it in 2022.
Fast facts
- What it is: an unofficial translation, usually distributed as a patch to apply to a copy of the game.
- First English patch: SD-Snatcher for the MSX, released in 1993 by the Dutch group Oasis, by common consensus in the community.
- Took off: in the late 1990s, as PC emulators made Super Famicom and Famicom games easy to play and to modify.
- Main hub: Romhacking.net, which hosted patches, tools and documents until it stopped taking submissions in August 2024.
- Legal position: unclear. Edge wrote in 2006 that fan translators “are playing in a grey area of IP law”.
The MSX beginning
Retro Gamer traced the practice back to the Netherlands, where Japan’s MSX computers sold well enough for a community of Dutch fans to import Japanese games. A group called Oasis, founded by Dennis Lardenoye and Ron Bouwland, made what the magazine called “the very first translation patch in English” in 1993: a translation of SD-Snatcher, Hideo Kojima’s 1990 role-playing game for Konami. They worked with nothing more than a disk editor, loading modified character sets into video memory and hunting for text to replace. Bouwland was not fluent in Japanese and often worked from a dictionary, and they lost 40 per cent of the text to lack of space, but the result was, Retro Gamer said, “regarded highly”.
Another MSX translation shows how far the fans could get ahead of the publisher. In 1997 Maarten ter Huurne and the translator Takamichi Suzukawa released an English version of Konami’s Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (1990). Suzukawa sent translated fragments of script, which ter Huurne, who could not read Japanese, labelled and inserted into the game; to save space he created his own custom language, compiler and compression algorithm. The work took three months. Konami’s own English version came later, when it included the game in Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence. It had taken the company “16 years”, Retro Gamer noted, while “Holland unofficially did it in seven”.
Final Fantasy V and the emulation boom
The scene grew from about 1996, when PC emulators made console games playable, and patchable, on an ordinary computer. Final Fantasy V was the game everyone wanted. Square had released it for the Super Famicom in 1992, but never outside Japan, so it became the “lost FF game”. Several groups started on it. One translator, Derrick Sobodash, told Retro Gamer in 2006 that he had “been involved in fan translation since 1996, when I was part of RPGe”. RPGe released its English patch for Final Fantasy V in October 1997. Retro Gamer called it “probably the most famous fan-translation ever; many cite it as the reason they got into this hobby”.
According to Edge, the fan patch was for a long time the only way to play Final Fantasy V in English, and “after the company became aware of this, the game was swiftly released as part of Final Fantasy Anthology”. Anthology came out in North America in 1999.
The late 1990s were also, veterans told Retro Gamer, “dark years filled with teenage melodrama”, with groups racing each other to release the first patch for the same game and some passing off others’ work as their own.
How a translation is made
Retro Gamer’s 2006 guide describes the process. The translator starts from a copy of the game: a dump of the cartridge’s ROM, or the files from a CD. Few games store text as ordinary characters. Instead, each letter on screen is a small graphic, and the text is a string of numbers that point to those graphics. By changing values and watching what appears on screen, hackers work out which number stands for which character, and build a “table” that converts one to the other. With the table they can dump the whole script, translate it, and write it back.
That is where the hard problems start:
- Space. An English sentence often takes more room than the Japanese one it replaces, and the cartridge has no room to spare. Oasis lost 40 per cent of SD-Snatcher’s text for that reason. Later hackers compressed text, moved it or rewrote the routines that print it.
- Pointers. Many games find each line of text through a table of addresses. When a translated line is longer or shorter than the original, the text after it moves, and every address that points to moved text has to be corrected.
- Fonts. A Japanese character is often drawn in an 8-by-8-pixel block. Translators squeezed two narrow English letters into one block, or added a variable-width font that fits more letters on a line. Retro Gamer found groups that had added variable-width fonts to Bahamut Lagoon and Der Langrisser, among other improvements.
- Pictures of words. Some games show text as graphics, such as a title screen, which has to be redrawn by hand. For a few games that is the only text there is.
Finally, the changes are saved as a patch: a list of the bytes to change, and where. The player applies it to their own copy of the game, so the patch itself contains none of the original.
Notable translations
| Game | Original release | Fan translation | Translators |
|---|---|---|---|
| SD-Snatcher (MSX) | 1990 | 1993 | Oasis (Dennis Lardenoye and Ron Bouwland) |
| Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (MSX) | 1990 | 1997 | Maarten ter Huurne and Takamichi Suzukawa |
| Final Fantasy V (Super Famicom) | 1992 | 1997 | RPGe |
| Seiken Densetsu 3 (Super Famicom) | 1995 | 2000 | Neill Corlett, with SoM2Freak and LNF Translations |
| Tales of Phantasia (Super Famicom) | 1995 | 2001 | DeJap Translations |
| Star Ocean (Super Famicom) | 1996 | DeJap Translations | |
| Bahamut Lagoon (Super Famicom) | 1996 | 2002 | DeJap, Neill Corlett and Tomato |
| Mother 3 (Game Boy Advance) | 2006 | 2008 | a team led by Clyde “Tomato” Mandelin |
Seiken Densetsu 3, the sequel to Secret of Mana, was the game Square dropped in favour of Secret of Evermore. Edge reported that the English translation was 80 per cent complete when it was abandoned. The fan translation was “a two-finger salute to SquareSoft for this decision”, in Edge’s words, and it became popular enough that unofficial English cartridges turned up for sale on eBay, without the permission of either Square or the translators. Square Enix finally released the game in English as Trials of Mana, in the Collection of Mana, in June 2019.
Tales of Phantasia, with its digitised speech and a sung theme song, was translated by DeJap in 2001, after at least two earlier attempts had failed. Retro Gamer noted that DeJap had “a reputation for taking too many scripting liberties”, and that in late 2002 another group released a patch that dubbed the game’s voices into English.
Mother 3
Mother 3, the Game Boy Advance sequel to EarthBound, came out in Japan in April 2006. By November it was clear Nintendo of America had no plans to localise it, and fans from the EarthBound community started their own translation. It took two years. Version 1.0 was released on 17 October 2008 and was “downloaded well over 100,000 times in the months which followed”. The team kept updating it: version 1.3 appeared in April 2021. The translation’s own website asks players to “try to find a legit copy of the game” first.
As late as November 2022 Wireframe was still writing about fans’ “constant calls” for an official English translation, and “the platform holder’s continued refusal”.
How publishers responded
Publishers’ reactions have been mixed. In 1999 John Lawrence of Enix told fans that “although it may seem fun and interesting at first, it threatens our IP.” Atlus took a different line in 2006: “if fans choose to translate game text for their own personal use, then more power to them.” Richard Honeywood, Square Enix’s head of localisation, told Edge that he and his colleagues played fan translations too, “as we are always interested in seeing how other people render our work”. Fans sometimes used their translations to lobby. Nathan Deres of the Aeon Genesis group told Edge he had posted screenshots of his Shin Megami Tensei II translation on Atlus’s American website to press for an English Shin Megami Tensei III, “something which went on to happen, perhaps in part due to our efforts”. By Edge’s account in 2006, only one company had threatened legal action: ASCII, which made the translation group Kanji Hack remove its patch for RPG Tsukuru 2.
Fan translators themselves avoided newer games. “I generally don’t work on games that are new or still in production,” Gideon Zhi told Retro Gamer. Some went on to paid work. Derrick Sobodash, one of the first fan translators to work from Chinese, was hired by Super Fighter Team as lead programmer for its Beggar Prince project.
Romhacking.net
Much of this activity was gathered at Romhacking.net, founded in 2005 as a successor to an earlier site. Its “Community Graveyard” in 2006 already listed more than 580 retired or vanished people and groups. On 1 August 2024 its founder, who goes by Nightcrawler, stopped new submissions and made the site read-only. He wrote that it had “achieved almost everything it set out to do”, but that “copyright pressures increased dramatically with takedowns and legal burden”. The site’s database was handed to the Internet Archive for safekeeping.
Sources
- Retro Gamer issue 25, 2006, pp. 102–105, “Emulation Nation”: the MSX origins and Oasis; SD-Snatcher; the 1996 revival and Final Fantasy V; “The FF Translation Wars”; the ROM-hacking guide; Gideon Zhi; “close to a thousand” patches; Seiken Densetsu 3, Tales of Phantasia and Metal Gear 2 panels.
- Retro Gamer issue 30, 2006, pp. 100–103, follow-up on fan translation and interview with Derrick Sobodash: the Romhacking.net “Community Graveyard”; Sobodash and RPGe in 1996; Beggar Prince; no English Mother 3 announced.
- Edge issue 159, February 2006, p. 81, “Forbidden words” panel in a feature on localisation: Seiken Densetsu 3 and Secret of Evermore; the Enix and Atlus quotes; the “grey area of IP law”; ASCII and Kanji Hack; Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy Anthology; fan-patch dates and credits for Seiken Densetsu 3 and Bahamut Lagoon.
- Wireframe issue 68, November 2022, p. 66: continued fan calls for an official Mother 3 translation.
- Wikipedia, “Fan translation of video games” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary), citing EMU News Service reports from 1997: the formation of RPGe in July 1997 and its Final Fantasy V patch, 16 October 1997; Oasis’s SD Snatcher in April 1993. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_translation_of_video_games
- Wikipedia, “Final Fantasy V”, “Star Ocean (video game)” and “Trials of Mana” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): the 1992 Japanese release of Final Fantasy V and the 1999 North American release of Final Fantasy Anthology; DeJap’s Star Ocean patch; the 2019 Collection of Mana.
- Wikipedia, “ROM hacking” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): Romhacking.net’s launch in 2005 and its read-only status from 1 August 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROM_hacking
- MOTHER 3 Fan Translation website (web, secondary): the project’s start in November 2006, the 1.0 release on 17 October 2008, downloads and later versions. https://mother3.fobby.net/
- Wikipedia, “Mother 3 fan translation” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): Clyde “Tomato” Mandelin as project lead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_3_fan_translation
- Catherine Lewis, GamesRadar+, 2 August 2024 (web, secondary): Nightcrawler’s statement on winding down Romhacking.net and the database’s transfer to the Internet Archive. https://www.gamesradar.com/games/20-year-old-romhack-site-that-was-a-treasure-trove-of-pokemon-fan-games-and-jrpg-translations-winds-down-after-achieving-almost-everything-it-set-out-to-do/