News of my death has been …

I only just yesterday posted that notice about canning Heroine Anthem II and Der Langrisser likely being my final translation. Apparently word gets around fast.

So, before anyone starts with any Hotel California references and my wonderful “quitting” record thus far, let me do a little explaining.

Yes, Der Langrisser was a huge project, but it alone probably wouldn’t get me to drop this hobby. I still find it terribly fascinating, and documenting new file formats or working out new methods to make new systems and games accessible for translation is something I just love.

In truth — that is the part that has kept me going this long. I don’t have the stamina to beat through a huge project, but I hope I can keep laying ground work. That’s a major part of my work with libPirate. So I won’t be quitting in that sense — I just won’t be taking on new projects to translate more games. I would like to spend my time working on things to make it easier for new generations of college and high school kids — people who have all the time in the world — to work on translating more games.

The other side of it is, I have been doing this for a long, long time. Friday, the release date for Der Langrisser is the ten-year anniversary of when I was pulled into a fight on Zophar’s Message Domain. That fight did a lot to publicize translation, and was one of the events that got the scene started. July 8 will be the ten-year anniversary of RPGe’s founding, and I was around even before that.

More than two-fifths of my life has been dedicated to this hobby, and I’m just losing interest. I want to pursue more directions, and don’t want a load of stagnant projects and eager fans awaiting their completion hanging over everything I do.

I’m not pissed off at someone. I’m not pissed off at the scene. I’ve just run out of games I find interesting, and have accepted I don’t have the stamina for another six-year project.

Ten years ago this day, I was sitting in Catherine Bembas’s Honors English class in Notre Dame Preparatory, translating hex print outs of Final Fantasy V. I have come a long way since then to my Beijing Youth Media Group office where I am typing this message, far enough where I’m amazed I can remember where it all started.

byuu and I were talking about this two nights ago. He hates Der Langrisser every bit as much as I do, but it’s hard to imagine what would have happened had we not taken on this project.

He thinks he would still be a terrible programmer with the most atrocious commenting system on the planet. He would have never developed bsnes. He wouldn’t have developed libco. He wouldn’t have done anything that has happened in the last five years.

Without the brain-killing work of translating Der Langrisser a script with no context in a language where context means more than the words spoken, I wouldn’t have become frustrated with Japanese. I wouldn’t have started studying Chinese. I would have never done the first work on non-Japanese game translations that sparked a lot of interest in Korean and Chinese games. I wouldn’t have improved my PHP skills as much as I have. Most importantly, I would not live here in Beijing, and I would have never met my girlfriend.

One small decision can impact our lives a lot. If I hadn’t helped John Grathwohl with Der Langrisser, and had he not freak-formatted his hard disk — effectively handing the fate of his project to me — I would be in an entirely different place today.

When I look back at things this way, while I hate the game, I can’t imagine not working on it, and I wouldn’t trade my life today for that unknown, alternate time line.

For anyone out there who has ever wanted to translate a game, do it. There is no reason not to try. There is no telling where your hobby will take you.