Mar 29, 2008
10 years since RPGe
BY DERRICK SOBODASH
intended to write something for March 19 to coincide with the day I left RPGe. Real life jumped in and this is coming 10 days late. Hey, at least with this delay it is now 10 years and 10 days, and that has a damn nice ring to it.
A decade is not a short time.
RPGe died 9 years ago. I left it in a total mess. I am not sure if I gave MagitekKn the e-mail addresses of the group’s other members. It was a disaster — one that made me look bad and crippled what was the first translation scene group, and up until that time the biggest.
Everything is gone. The older patches were never archived. The Web site, despite having more than a million hits, never made it into the Wayback Machine. Only one page survives, dating from the summer of 1997 — the first time I considered jumping ship. It is a humbling experience to see how something that was the talk of every Squaresoft fan page — then a huge chunk of the Internet — can be so easily lost.
It is hard to say how much of what I perceived to be the group’s success was ego and how much was grounded in reality. I started the project that eventually brought Final Fantasy V out in English. Square made an official release several years later, but it was different in 1998. Nintendo Power teased readers mercilessly with pictures of games they would never see from popular series. RPGe, DeJap and other groups were able to right a slighted generation of gamers.
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But what was our lasting influence?
From 1997 - 1998, the project had a massive following. If counters and logs are to be believed, then there were an awful lot of people downloading and testing our patches. It was a powerful feeling.
RPGe and other groups were in fierce competition. First it was to release the first fully translated game. Then the first fully-translated RPG. Then the most fully-translated games. I suspect people involved in the scene were lonely 15 to 18-year-old boys with an excess of ego and energy. I was no exception.
Sign off. Go outside. See your friends. Sure, if you do all that it is easy to laugh about what assholes people are to each other on the Internet.
The problem is that for people without friends, Internets are incredibly serious business.
I took things seriously. Very seriously. It was bad for my health. In my head, I honestly believed the with my long hours on projects I was doing something that mattered. I thought what I was doing was no different than people who put in hours in a soup kitchen. If I could just finish the project, then it would make the day, week or month better for all Square fans.
This view was largely killed by a parody of me written by Steven “demi” Demeter. In the parody, I was incredibly selfish, avoided doing any work, used everyone else and used RPGe to justify envisioning myself as a celebrity. I can laugh at it today, but at the time it bothered me. I don’t know how much, if any of it, is true. I don’t recall deliberately using anyone, and the reality of being a high school outcast grounded any delusions of importance I could have developed.
byuu would say translation mattered, because it mattered at the time to a small group of people.
Maybe it did, but according to Wikipedia, we and everything we did are most non-notable.
I took everything too seriously and snapped. I could not continue dealing with the translation scene, and I did not want any part in it or RPGe. Thanks to the magic of the Internet, I have the exact words I sent out when I left the group:
I can’t tolerate the number of people who send me flames and death threats, it’s more than I can bear to handle. I’m going off now to work on my own. Maybe I’ll program, maybe I’ll translate for myself, like I used to when it was fun, I don’t know but please wish me well in whatever I do. The unfinished translations that had been in work, Lunar Magic School, Ranma RPGe, and Pocket Monsters have been pulled from the site. I’m not sure who’s going to take charge here, pull RPGe back together, and manage our many members. I hope they can keep the spirit of doing this all for fun alive and well. I’ll miss some of our kind visitors at the message boards and all the members of RPGe. It’s been great but due to fate I can’t continue. Best wishes.
Yes. I was was flamed and sent death threats. Yes. Most of them were due to being the gatekeeper that all RPGe-related information went through. I think death threats on the Internet are the norm these days rather than the exception. It was a convenient excuse for me to get out — as in “out out,” not chasing sympathy or trying to rally support from the silent downloaders.
At the time, I had this fantastic notion I would retreat back to my Dragonfire page, keep working on games and somehow it would become fun again.
That did not happen.
I did retreat back to Dragonfire, but translating games was never fun again: surprising, given every translation on this Web site was completed after leaving RPGe.
I was not terribly productive. I said a lot of things that I am embarrassed to think about now. I started projects and abandoned all of them. The only thing I did finish was a paper translation of the Tekkaman Blade script, which would not end up inserted into the game until seven or more years later.
I learned to drive around the end of 1998 and made a few friends among my school’s other outcasts. I got a job cooking pizzas at a nearby Pizza Hut Express. I built something that resembled a social life: playing video games with friends is better than being told how much I suck by random netizens. We had a nice little group, and aside from childhood, I think it was one of the happiest times in my life.
During a few periods of depression, I did dip back into translation work. I used different names and released a couple documents and tools, though they were mostly crap. They were such crap that I will not even include them in this Web site, and I am frankly very pleased that I did not attach my name.
It was not until high school ended and took my social network with it that I would look at translations again. In 2001, I worked on Japanese Windows PC games. That summer, I dabbled in the Sega Saturn and Dreamcast to varying success. I played with the PC-98 disk formats, translated most of the X68000 system programs and worked on anything I could find that no one else would touch.
That is when I understood why translation never became fun again.
Reading demi’s parody, it sounds like I wanted attention at any cost to build myself up and did not mind stepping on people to get it. That first part may be true. I was looking for something that would bolster my confidence.
In 1997, translating games was uncharted territory. There were few tools and few documents. None of us knew what we were doing: it was educated guesses, trial and error and tinkering. I was learning and doing something few other people were able to do, and we were all able to teach each other.
That was the crack.
In most fields, you have to study and struggle for years to be an expert. However, if you invent a new field, then no matter how limited your knowledge you are an expert by default. I think that is what I was most after. I wanted more than anything else to be good at something no one else was. That is obvious even looking at the games I played. I logged an awful lot of hours playing SNK’s Art of Fighting games. I was quite good, and no one could contest that I was good at those games because no one else even played those games.
Even given that was my personal drive, I did have broader ambitions — all of which overreached the limits of my influence. I always pushed for people to expand and work on more systems. I was the first person to demonstrate translation work on nearly every platform released up to the Wonderswan Color. I was the first to toy with Korean and then Chinese games.
No matter what I documented or released, I was always alone. Even if people were interested in what I was working on, there was too much bad blood on both sides. The only long term friends to come out of it all were byuu and MK, the former of whom was chewed up and spit out much the way I was. Dark Force of DeJap and a lot of others tried to convince MK I was using him, though I would think the fact I still talk with him seven years later suggests otherwise.
It is hard to draw any conclusions about RPGe.
I have none of our work on my hard disk. Even the print out of the old “Final Fantasy V Translation” logo is lost. What will I tell people about that period of my life in 20 years? In 30? How much of the way I remember things is true, and is demi’s parody at all close to reality?
Most people have stories of high school sports or funny anecdotes about school life and friends. In place of that, I have hundred of hours of hammering away at screen of hexadecimal. I cannot say if that should fill me with pride or sadness.
Interesting read. I was one of the people that used to check the statuses of game traslations often, waiting for the day where i could play much heralded Jpn games in english. sorry it consumed so much of your life…but atleast it help lead the way to this cool sight here
Eh, wasn’t whining. Just looking back at the experience. I can’t say it was a positive one, but I guess it made people at the time happy. That’s something. Still, hindsight is 20/20. Everyone has tons of stuff they wish they had done different.
Interesting read, even though I was busy with my TMNT action figures in ‘98, and never even heard of RPGe until I read this post here.
Though I have had numerous experiences with the internet and how it can fuck you over with your social life. At one point you just have to realize…
it’s only the fuckin’ internet.
Thanks for taking the time to write this, Derrick. I think it takes great courage to write something objective about ones self, especially when they have failed.
Responding to your last questions,
> What will I tell people about that period of my life in 20 years?
You don’t need to tell them anything, just get them to read this article.
> How much of the way I remember things is true, and is demi’s parody at all close to reality?
The way you remember things will always be true. The only thing they might not be is fact. Worrying over whether or not Demi’s parody is true is pointless, not to mention self-defeating. Don’t do it.
In any case, keep up the good work!
Derrick,
The way other people spent their social life, like your own experience, are just that - individual experiences. Once you are years ahead and looking back, they are no more (and no less) valuable than that of your own, with the exception that you get less of it if you refuse to learn something from it.
But… you wrote this essay. This means that time was important to you and you learned an experience that few other people in the world have. Even if this is retroactive, you have added value into your life with this memory.
I want to stress that I am consciously *not* trying to do the “everyone’s life is valuable” deal. There are valuable uses of time and non-valuable uses of time, and maybe there were more efficient and happier uses of your time you “could have” done (and of course less efficient ways too). My argument is that most of your value function probably comes from reflection and learning upon the previous experiences, so just by doing this you have done much already.
To put it into extremes, I would have made the same argument whether you spent your youth in poverty, in a privileged class, in hard work and studying, in carefree bliss and drinking, in introverted time for yourself, or in extroverted companionship. The value comes from looking back, analyzing, and learning some life experience from it - which is precisely what you have done now. *That* is an experience few people have the patience or inclination to do.
I like your clear and detailed writing style. The blogosphere needs more people like you. Keep it up.
Best,
-Yan
I am sorry for digging up the past, but this is is the second best article I have read all day (in my very unenlightened, very biased) opinion next to “The long walk Home”
Would you have done anything differently? To me, and my circle you are, and always will be The Legend, I looked up to you because you did things no one else would touch. I admired your honesty, and determination, but people do what they always do they eat you up, that will not be recorded, but was it a waste? If you met someone you are still talking to 7 years later, was it not worth it? If I may ask how many people from high school do you keep in contact with? (I have about 6 personally, but I do not live anywhere near as far as you from my school)
This is not a feel good post for you, as I know you never wanted that, and I know this is not a whining post, but I want you to know that yes, you made alot of people happy, and they are ungrateful SOB’s, but you also aided in paving the way for a great deal of people. Ideally they would not all be dumb as rocks, but we take what we can get.
I wanted to make one last point, I still look up to you, ya got out, and if you are happier this way then I am happy for you, I only wish you would not regret those 10 years, some of it maybe, but having a cloud that big over ones head can not be good for ones health.
Best wishes and good luck.
I recall checking your site eagerly when I was a kid hoping beyond hope that I could get ahold of translated FFV and Bahamut Lagoon. Sad to hear you regret spending your time working on those translations, just thought it was interesting that I stumbled across your site so long after I had forgotten all about SNES ROMs and the efforts people put into translating them.