Baumann Ken - EarthBound

Boss Fight Books

Los Angeles, CA

www.bossfightbooks.com

Copyright 2014 Ken Baumann. All rights reserved.

ISBN 13: 978-1-940535-00-5

First Printing: 2014

A brief portion of this book appeared on Kotaku.

Book Design by Ken Baumann

Page Design by Adam Robinson

twoson

The first sign you see reads: Twosonwe got this name because we werent first.

*

Scott is seven years, six weeks, and a day older than me, and Im seven years, six weeks and two days older than my sister. (I looked it up.) The biblical spacing between my siblings and I didnt portend to how we were raised, though. My dad is and was a staunch atheist, and my mother a happy agnostic. Around fourteen, Scottmy half-brother and the son of my moms ex-husbandtook up my dads philosophical arms and accidentally combined them with a cocktail of teenage hormones and his brilliant, structure-hating mind, which lead to a short but hard period of drug use and backyard bomb-building.

Meanwhile, I was a clean-cut kiss-ass, charming every teacher and my parents by being a polite little egghead. And this baffled my parents; up until I was five years old, my mom and dad joked to friends that they were saving money for college (for Scott) and bail (for me). Probably because I head-butted people when they tried to pick me up.

By the time we adopted Demi, I had become the necro-nerd who busies himself at his desk in third grade by drawing Spawn (the comic book antihero) and various situations regarding dismemberment, scattered human heads, troweled guts, explosions, dragons, wolves, etc. I had also taken to wearing mostly black to cop my brothers doomed fashion sense.

Scott and I watched a lot of animeCartoon Network in the late 90s played a daily afterschool block of golden era series like Dragon Ball Z , Sailor Moon, and Gundam Wing under the banner Toonamiand we played a lot of video games together before he moved up to high school and started spending time with kids who (quietly) claimed to be members of the Trench Coat Mafia.

*

As you guide Ness through Twoson, youll pass a bunch of examples of the games North American localization. These edits are either secular, puritanical, or legalisticfor instance, red crosses were removed from EarthBound s hospitals after Nintendo discovered that the American Red Cross is litigious. Almost all references to religion, sex, murder, death, movies, and brand and band names are absent for English-speaking players. (All of these localization differences have been obsessively compiled by Clyde Mandelina staple of the online EarthBound communityat his site Legends of Localization.) One unintentionally awkward substitution: All references to booze were instead changed to coffee, a depressant-to-stimulant swap that often makes NPC behavior seem odd. Not all of the localization efforts were meant to dampen EarthBound , though; Legends of Localization features a table in which names of encounterable enemies in Mother 2 and EarthBound put side-by-side, and the English names are much more evocative (e.g. the Carefree Guy becomes the New Age Retro Hippie).

As Mandelin says, Game translations almost NEVER got this much careful treatment; just like Squares RPGs from the time, EarthBound was one of the earliest text-heavy console games to be given a truly serious, competent, and enjoyable localization.

*

I mean, not many people quote lines from Call of Duty .

Thats Marcus Lindblom, EarthBound s main North American localization producer and translator. Were at the top of a conversation thatll last two hours.

Marcus over-the-phone voice is hearty and authoritative. At certain points in our conversation, I feel like Im talking to one of the gruff buzzcut guys who always seem to work at NASA in movies about the Apollo missions.

Marcus says, EarthBound was very much a weird blend of humor and quirkiness, but also its got this underlying tone of you know, teaching lessons, almost. Its got a sort of deep, odd drama to it.

We riff on that for a bit, then I ask him the stumper: Have you encountered anything since that feels similar to EarthBound ? Something that pulls in stuff from so many disparate genres? It can be from any medium movies, TV, books.

Marcus brings up O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the Coen brothers movie. I sense its similaritiesthe goofiness, the self-awareness, the moral lessons and mythological nods, the emphasis on music. But still, EarthBound feels bigger, maybe only because of the wider temporal boundaries that video games provide. Even a movie as large in scope as Cloud Atlas shows the seams of its material limits (Im thinking of the prosthetic makeup and Tom Hankss inability to do a convincing, non-offensive accent). Though comparing EarthBound to even a three-hour long movie is unfair because EarthBound takes about twenty hours to play, not considering glitch-exploiting speed runs that take less than three hours. Role-playing games like EarthBound , then, are more temporally akin to long-running television shows, though neither are made without incredibly intricate (and strenuous) budgets.

EarthBound was one of the hardest games I worked on, Marcus says. We started around Christmas in 94, then worked heavily for three months on the writing. The English build wasnt even playable until March.

So howd the writing process work?

Well, the other translator I worked with, Masamuki Miyota, took a first pass at the text to just get it into broad-strokes English. And Japanese is a difficult language so it often would need a lot of work. Then Id go over it and try to make sure the jokes worked, the puns, the references. And if they didnt, I tried to find something culturally similar enough to work for North American audiences. But it all happened really, really fast. Marcus laughs. Its funny theres a text file out there on the internet, I think, of the EarthBound script, including some of its code. Well thats exactly what we had to work with. A lot of times, we couldnt see the line that came before the line that we were translating at the time, or we didnt have access to the original Japanese. We were sort of working in a black box.

This sort of baffles me, so I ask him about three times to confirm that this was truly the case. So wait: did it seem like you were just translating non sequiturs a lot of the time?

Yes. But I hoped, at the time, that the weirdness of the game allowed me the latitude to get away with it.

Is the North American version of EarthBound truer to the tone Shigesato Itoi designed because of this black box translating? Marcus admits that the harried, opaque translation process made our version weirder less profane because of the censorship, but more benignly eccentric.

This tone is exactly the element that stayed with me most as I grew up.

*

Twosons the town from my childhood playthrough that I remember most cohesively, probably due to its hilariously domestic enemiesyou fight the Ramblin Evil Mushroom, Annoying Old Party Man, Unassuming Local Guy, Cranky Lady, and the aforementioned New Age Retro Hippy. All of these battles are scored by a track appropriately titled Battle Against a Weird Opponent (which would make a great memoir title).

EarthBound s official soundtrackonly released in Japancontains an hour of music split into twenty-four tracks. But EarthBound actually contains 170 tracks that take up a third of its 24-megabit cartridge. Though the complete in-game soundtrack takes up 183.5 megabytes on my computer, which is weird to consider, because 24 megabitsthe largest storage capacity for Super Nintendo cartridgesis equivalent to just 3 megabytes. Or we can look at the game this way: Since 1 megabit = 1,000,000 bits, the entire world of EarthBound is manifested by 24,000,000 binary decisions.

To be able to casually interact with entertainment that complex and laborious still blows my mind, and deeper still when I remember that I was doing it as a kid, innocent of any given products measure and human cost; I hadnt discovered the painful realities of capitalism first comprehensively described by Karl Marx, realities recently evoked by the collapse of a Bangladeshi garment factory (1,129 dead) and the Foxconn suicides (14 dead). And, like an iPhone or a t-shirt, piece of complex entertainment such as a video game or a feature film only exists when thousands of people labor for thousands of hours to make it exist. Rhythm & Hues Studios, a visual effects and animation company, filed for bankruptcy thirteen days before it won an Oscar for its work on Life of Pi . (A storied feature film producer told me that if his productions dont bankrupt at least one VFX house, I havent done my financial due diligence.)