[March 29, 2023]
March was a slow month. I spent most of my time sick, with some strange illness that made me cough violently and feel tired all the time. There was a week when I literally couldn't leave the house due to fatigue and fever. The doctors told me it was "bronchitis" (sic), but they also prescribed me a bunch of stuff that didn't help at all, so who knows what the hell I actually had. Fortunately I'm better now (and all the tests came back normal), but all in all this month had about 2 or 3 weeks where I did nothing and just kind of existed. And that's okay!
It was also in March that spring started, specifically on March 21st. It's funny because since I was little I always heard my mom say things like "oh vinícius, the 21st is when spring/fall/etc starts" and I never paid attention, you know? It's like finding out that today is "stenographer's day" or "mate seller's day" -- cool, but it doesn't affect me in any way! Imagine my surprise then when, right on the week of the 21st, I went outside and all the trees on the main street were blooming.
Living in Spain, this is something I never tire of noticing: here in Europe they take this seasons thing seriously. In winter it's cold, in summer it's hot, in fall leaves fall and in spring there are flowers. I don't know how it is in the other Brazilian states where you live, but in Rio de Janeiro there are basically two seasons: pre-summer and summer, where in pre-summer it's 30 degrees and in summer it's 40. As you can see the variety is somewhat limited, so it was really bizarre for me to see firsthand that this spring with flowers thing actually exists outside of a cartoon.
A subject I delved into this month was fan translations: game translations made by fans. It all started when a 30-minute video called "What it takes to fan-translate a video game" appeared on my timeline, in which the author explains in detail how he translated a PS1 game from Japanese to English -- more specifically, Dr. Slump.
Being a computer science graduate, I've learned to never underestimate the difficulty of any task involving a computer, but even so I was surprised by the ENORMOUS work it takes to translate one of these games. It's a technical challenge, no doubt, but above all it's a psychological challenge: you're doing something that wasn't meant to be done, and every step of the way is a painful reminder of that. For example:
...and let's suppose that you manage, after weeks or months of effort, to translate the whole thing in a way that everything seems to be working. You take screenshots, show others, celebrate, and SUDDENLY you discover that some of the game's cutscenes started freezing. Out of nowhere. What did you do wrong?? I have no idea -- have fun!
Making a fan translation from a ROM is like cloning a chicken from a photo of an egg. Except cloning is the first step: you still have to genetically modify it to make it cluck in English.
And I confess that part of me sees all this and thinks: "my god! I could never do this", which makes me severely depressed. Because in a way, I was trained for this, you know? I studied these subjects in college. I learned about compilers, and assembly code, and pointers and compression algorithms. Of course I haven't used any of this knowledge since then, but in theory I should be able to face this challenge, and it's frustrating to know that I feel brutally unprepared to get even close to it.
...and it was in the middle of this emotional hurricane that I found this wonderful account, written by the programmer who worked on the Policenauts fan translation.
First the context: in the distant year of 2008, when Brazilian radios alternated between the newly released "Boa Sorte / Good Luck" by Vanessa da Mata and "No One" by Alicia Keys, there was a forum in a quiet corner of the internet called Something Awful, where people posted, among many things, a thread format called "Let's Play". In these threads, authors posted screenshots of games followed by funny comments underneath, exactly as we understand a Let's Play today -- but in a textual format.
And at that moment in question, there was a guy (named slowbeef) who really wanted to do a Let's Play of Policenauts, a 1994 game written and directed by the famous Hideo Kojima. There was just one problem: Policenauts had only been released in Japanese, and although a team had managed to extract and translate the game's script, no one had achieved the technical feat of putting that script into the game to make a playable translated ROM. But okay! With the script in hand, you can translate the screenshots and make a translated Let's Play -- then the whole community can experience the game in English, in a way. That's good enough, right? With this idea in mind, slowbeef contacts the guy who had translated the script, and asks for access to the text. The translator agrees to give the Prologue script... and nothing more.
At that moment, slowbeef realizes he needs to find a way to convince the guy to release more of the translated script. He needs bargaining power. So, he starts considering the real possibility of contributing himself to the translation as a programmer, since he had graduated in computer science (almost a decade ago!). And it's precisely at this moment that the account begins.
Exactly the same reaction I had!! It's always very special when someone conveys exactly what you thought only you felt.
Eventually, slowbeef accepts the challenge and decides to participate in the game's translation team as a programmer. Over the next eight months, he learns a ton of stuff about ROM hacking, encounters countless obstacles, becomes intimately familiar with the game's code, and almost quits the project about 3 times. But everything works out in the end, and in August 2009 the game translation is made publicly available on the internet, finally making all of Kojima's games available in English.
I recommend everyone read the account! Slowbeef's writing is funny, probably because of the years he spent writing Let's Plays. It's an emotional roller coaster that illustrates very well the feeling of "a task that doesn't want to be done". After reading the whole account, I confess I felt a bit nostalgic. Although 2008 isn't that far away, for me this pre-smartphone era seems like it was about a thousand years ago, when not only the world was very different, but the internet itself (something I've already talked about extensively).
And I think: what is this guy doing now? Does he still think about this translation to this day? Is he still proud? Does he introduce himself at parties with "hello, I hacked Policenauts and helped translate it to English"? Is he still alive?
In "Voices Out of the Darkness", the assyriologist/historian/wizard Irving Finkel talks about his work as a curator at the British Museum, which involves reading many cuneiform tablets from ancient Mesopotamia from 4000 years ago. And what he says is that, despite the historical distance being so great and giving us the impression that these people are -- somehow -- inherently different from us, this impression is not confirmed when you read the records these people left behind. Much of it was about bureaucratic and commercial matters, but often with a touch of humanity that can catch you off guard. Children who drew instead of doing their homework, translators who changed the translated message so as not to upset their bosses, farmers who invented the worst excuses possible for having paid less tax than they should... it's impossible to see this kind of thing without thinking that these people were, at the end of the day, people like us.
I feel something similar reading this Policenauts account, reading in first person about a guy who came from the anonymous void of the internet, translated a game, and left. And that's it, that's his contribution, you know? He undoubtedly did many other things in his life and has his own achievements, he may be known by everyone in the neighborhood as a good father and a great friend, but as far as we can know, slowbeef is the guy who translated Policenauts. And that's it.
And naturally, I start thinking about how I will be remembered in the future. Which artifacts of my life will survive? What will be left out? Should this matter? These are all questions that come to mind when I find an artifact like this -- a message in a bottle.
With no expectations, I put the name "slowbeef" on Google. No results. What a shame! But that's okay, it was worth a try.
...no, wait, I spelled it wrong. I wrote strongbeef, it's slowbeef. Now Google gives me some results! But wait,
he has a Wikipedia page?!?
In 2007, a year before embarking on the Policenauts odyssey, slowbeef started a Let's Play thread of the game "The Immortal", released for NES in 1990. The first page followed the normal style -- screenshots of the game with accompanying text --, but on the second page, slowbeef decides to try something new.
slowbeef is widely recognized as the creator of the first Let's Play video in internet history.
When he started hacking Policenauts, he had already done something with a much greater impact on the world (if it even makes sense to measure these things). The whole odyssey of hacking the game, the tension of a man rediscovering his own abilities, the drama of "is this even possible?"... all of this gets a single sentence on Wikipedia:
"In 2008, he contributed to a fan translation of Policenauts which came to completion in 2009."
...
In retrospect, everything I said here stops making sense, right? Or rather, it still makes sense but the example in question no longer applies. The guy is not only not anonymous, he wasn't anonymous before translating the game. And now? What's the moral of the story? I have no idea -- I've already written many endings to this text, many alternative reflections, but in the end everything seems a bit out of place. Let this, then, be the simple conclusion: sometimes, things are funny!