Marcus brings up O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the Coen brothers movie. 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. It's got a sort of deep, odd drama to it." Marcus says, " EarthBound was very much a weird blend of humor and quirkiness, but also it's got this underlying tone of. At certain points in our conversation, I feel like I'm talking to one of the gruff buzzcut guys who always seem to work at NASA in movies about the Apollo missions. Marcus' over-the-phone voice is hearty and authoritative.
We're at the top of a conversation that'll last two hours. That's Marcus Lindblom, EarthBound's main North American localization producer and translator. "I mean, not many people quote lines from Call of Duty."
the Carefree Guy becomes the New Age Retro Hippie).Īs Mandelin says, "Game translations almost NEVER got this much careful treatment just like Square's RPGs from the time, EarthBound was one of the earliest text-heavy console games to be given a truly serious, competent, and enjoyable localization." 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. (All of these localization differences have been obsessively compiled by Clyde Mandelin-a staple of the online EarthBound community-at 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. Almost all references to religion, sex, murder, death, movies, and brand and band names are absent for English-speaking players. These edits are either secular, puritanical, or legalistic-for instance, red crosses were removed from EarthBound's hospitals after Nintendo discovered that the American Red Cross is litigious. As you guide Ness through Twoson, you'll pass a bunch of examples of the game's North American localization.
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