When Namco offered its new maze game to its American partner Midway in 1980, the first thing to change was the name. In Japanese, Namco’s Hide Nakajima explained, puck is the sound of eating something good, and the game was Puck-Man. Midway’s people saw a problem. “They didn’t like how it rhymed with your very popular expletive,” he told Video Games in 1982, “so we changed it to Pac.” From then on, a game that travelled between Japan, America and Europe was rarely quite the same game in all three. Its text was rewritten, its pictures redrawn to suit local laws and tastes, its difficulty adjusted, its music sometimes replaced, and now and then the game itself was swapped for a different one.
Fast facts
- What changed: names and text, pictures, difficulty, sound, and sometimes whole levels or games.
- Why: language, local law and taste, the cost and memory limits of translation, and the television standard.
- Two kinds of change: a localisation difference between territories, and a version difference between one platform or re-release and another.
- Later: by the 2000s, localisation was planned with the developers from the start, and some translated versions were sold back to Japan as improved editions.
Names and words
Many changes were small. Hudson’s Takahashi Meijin, the celebrity gamer who starred in the Famicom’s Adventure Island, became Master Higgins in America, and Technos renamed its hero Kunio as Alex for River City Ransom. Japanese names could also sound wrong in English. Edge noted that Xenogears’ Shitan became Citan, and that Dew Prism was retitled Threads of Fate for America because, it had been said, its name could be misheard.
Translation itself was often an afterthought. Until the mid-1990s, Edge explained in a 2006 feature on localisation, the arcade firms (it named Namco, Capcom, Konami and SNK) usually translated their games in-house in Japan, “with some extremely varied results (including the now-legendary ‘All your base…’ line from Zero Wing)”, which came from the opening of the European Mega Drive version of Toaplan’s Zero Wing. When Tonka brought Phantasy Star to America in 1988, the translation came back from Japan “in very stilted English”, and the copywriter John Sauer rewrote it.
Memory made translation harder still. Kaoru Moriyama, one of Square’s early translators, told Edge that “we usually had too much text already in Japanese to fit in whatever the ROM size was, let alone the English translation”, which could need “six to eight times more letters than we could afford”. In Final Fantasy Legend on the Game Boy, the player’s names were limited to four characters.
Pictures and content
Some changes followed the law. When Konami’s Contra came to European NES owners in 1990 as Probotector, its two commandos had become robots, and some of the enemies with them. Retro Gamer has given the reason as “concerns over Germany’s stringent laws about violence against human characters in videogames”, and the Probotector name stayed with the series in Europe until the PlayStation 2 era.
Other changes followed taste. Sega Retro’s comparison of the Japanese and American Mega Drive versions of DJ Boy lists a first boss who was recoloured for the West and throws doughnuts instead of farting, and a final boss whose skin was lightened. Richard Honeywood, Square’s head of localisation, told Edge that “back in the old NES and SNES days it was common practice to have to change sensitive wordings”: Chrono Trigger had “alcoholic drinks replaced by soft ones, and pubs changed to cafes”. Xenogears, with its corrupt church, was nearly left in Japan, and its American distributors made him rename the “church” as “ethos”. The Regional Censorship entry covers more of these changes.
Difficulty, both ways
It is often said that games were made harder for the West, but the changes went in both directions. Nintendo’s Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 was not released in the West for years, because, as SNES Force put it in 1993, it was “considered too difficult for American and European games players” (see Difficulty Design). In its place America and Europe got a different game. Edge explained to its readers in 1993 that the Western Super Mario Bros. 2 was “originally called Doki Doki Panic in Japan”, set in “mythical Arabia”, and Total! added that “Nintendo of America decided to change the sprites”. The swap even travelled back: when Super Mario Collection (Super Mario All-Stars in the West) went on sale in Japan, Edge pointed out that Japanese players had already seen all four games on the Famicom, “including the UK/US SMB2 which was Doki Doki Panic”.
Square went the other way with Final Fantasy IV. “We increased the experience points, reduced monsters’ HP and reduced the number of random encounters to make the gameplay smoother for the North American audience,” Honeywood said. The easier American version was then released in Japan, with Japanese text, as Final Fantasy IV Easy Type.
Music and sound
Sound changed too. The American release of Sonic CD on the Mega-CD had a different soundtrack from the Japanese and European versions, as Retro Gamer noted. Its tunes were the work of Spencer Nilsen, who wrote the music for many of Sega’s own Mega-CD games. The Japanese Phantasy Star II, by Sega Retro’s comparison, used “different, louder drum samples” that were replaced for the Western releases: not a translation and not censorship, but a change to the mix.
Cuts and slowdowns
Sometimes the West simply got less. Retro Gamer pointed out that the Famicom Contra had map screens, extra cut-scenes and animations, such as swaying palm trees in the first level, “not seen in the US game”. On a European television, every game also had to deal with the slower 50Hz picture; the PAL vs NTSC entry tells how that made many imported and converted games slower and smaller on the screen.
Regional or version?
The documentation project Sega Retro separates these two kinds of change on every comparison page, under “Localisation comparisons” and “Version comparisons”, and the distinction prevents some common mistakes. The red crosses on the hospital sign and the doctor’s suit in Phantasy Star II are often quoted as an example of regional censorship in 1989, but Sega Retro files them under version: they were removed for the Virtual Console re-release, many years later, not for the West. DJ Boy shows the other kind of change. In the arcade, a player lost a life after two hits; on the Mega Drive, the game had a health bar and a single life. A coin-operated game’s lives were there to take money, and on a home console they were rebalanced.
Later
By the 2000s, localisation had become a planned stage of a game’s development. In Edge’s 2006 feature, Atlus’s localisation staff described translators playing through each game first and compiling lists of names and terms, and Honeywood described Yuji Horii approving every name change in the North American Dragon Quest VIII, then working with the translators to add British voices, orchestral music and new animations. Leslie Swan, who led Nintendo of America’s localisation teams, said her aim was to make the translation unnoticeable: “the idea is to make the emotional experience identical for players globally.”
Some changes travelled back. Edge noted that versions changed for Western players were “being repackaged and sold back to the market of origin as a special edition”, and that these “international versions” were increasingly treated as the definitive releases. Region locking, the other half of the story, also faded: the Region Locking entry follows it to Nintendo’s region-free Switch in 2017, and the Import Gaming entry tells how players got round it before then.
Sources
- Video Games vol. 1 no. 1, August 1982, pp. 23–26: Hide Nakajima on Puck-Man and Pac-Man.
- Edge issue 159, February 2006: localisation feature (Atlus, in-house translation by Japanese arcade firms, Zero Wing, Kaoru Moriyama, Final Fantasy Legend, Richard Honeywood on Final Fantasy IV, Chrono Trigger and Xenogears, Shitan and Citan, Dew Prism, Dragon Quest VIII, Leslie Swan, international versions).
- Retro Gamer issue 109, December 2012, p. 55, and Retro Gamer Collection volume 3, 2009, p. 217: Probotector and Germany’s rules on violence; the Famicom Contra’s extra scenes.
- SNES Force issue 4, October 1993, p. 34: The Lost Levels.
- Edge issue 1, October 1993, p. 99: Super Mario All-Stars and Doki Doki Panic. Edge issue 4, January 1994, p. 17: Japanese charts and Super Mario Collection. Total! issue 21, September 1993, p. 24: Super Mario All-Stars.
- Retro Gamer Collection volume 4, 2010, p. 72: Sonic CD’s American soundtrack. Classic Gamer Magazine vol. 2 no. 2, July 2004, p. 23: review of the Sonic Boom album (Spencer Nilsen and the American Sonic CD music).
- Sega Retro, “Phantasy Star II/Comparisons” and “DJ Boy/Comparisons” (database, web, secondary): localisation and version comparisons. https://segaretro.org/Phantasy_Star_II/Comparisons https://segaretro.org/DJ_Boy/Comparisons