[sharc]

i spend a likely appalling amount of my free time rooting around for information about old games, circumstances behind their development and stories from the people that made them. occasionally this actually pays off; usually this means huge amounts of text and informal language that are infinitely outside my ability to translate.

recently i've given up on the idea of ever managing this myself, and instead started commissioning translations from glitterberri, someone who actually knows what she's doing. most likely relevant to sb interests are a brief piece with gimmick! designer tomomi sakai, and an extended interview with tokuro fujiwara on basically his entire work history from pooyan up to resident evil. they're both pretty hard people to find anything out about, and as far as i know neither interview has been translated before.

the one with sakai is especially heartbreaking in how gimmick! got passed on, not for publishing but just for distribution, when retailers learned it was just a famicom game.

fujiwara has plenty to say as well, though; it probably explains a lot about the jump in production quality between mega man 1 and 2 that he joined the team for the sequel.

i can think of at least a few people around here that will be interested in these, so enjoy, sb!

[Take It Sleazy]

Thank you so much for these!

[Dark Age Iron Savior]

Nice. I've seen Glitterberri be helpful at TCRF but didn't realize she was doing commissions for game translations. Thanks for sharing these.

(come to think of it, sharc, you have an account at Lostlevels, right?* Did you link them on the Gimmick interview?)
*actually I'm pretty sure I'm confusing things here but whatever

Does anyone know of a place where these kind of interviews+translations get collected and indexed? Could something be setup at a site like the Internet Archive?

[sharc]

i thought you'd enjoy that fujiwara one, sleazy

i do have an account at lost levels, though glitterberri already talked to frank cifaldi about the sakai interview since he is gimmick! super fan number one.

no idea if there's any kind of repository for interviews in english, although gsla has a huge stockpile of them in japanese (though i think you already know about that site). maybe that would be a good project for the sb wiki?

[sharc]

this is already fairly old news but an intrepid soul at the shmups forum has been translating shooter-related interviews from gsla japan. both are full of great little stories and are rare windows into arcade game development in its golden years.

gradius interviews
r-type interviews

additionally, glitterberri just finished the second part of the gimmick! staff interviews, a discussion with composer masashi kageyama. submitted for your approval.

[Deets]

I actually really, really want to work on putting together a repository/archive site for all of those scattered translations out there, for the record

[BenoitRen]

I've been wanting to put together an archive of all Phantasy Star-related interviews, but I could see myself doing this for other series too.
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[Dark Age Iron Savior]

sharc what have you doooooooonnnnnnneeeeeeee

[GlitterBerri]

Are you two interested in potentially working together on this? It's been a goal of mine for quite some time as well.

I've got quite the collection assembled so far, mostly done by me, and I'm planning to add the other R-Type and shooting game interviews that sharc linked to now that I've received the translator's permission. Still need to format them, though.

Shoot me an email at glitterberri.com@gmail.com if you'd like to talk about making this a reality.

[BenoitRen]

Has anyone heard back from GlitterBerri? Last I heard from her was in april of this year, and she was going to contact me back. I've tried to reestablish contact a couple months back, but got no reply.
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[WarpZone]

Lots here, and not all shmup-related despite the name, such as Quintet, Ys, and Mother:

http://shmuplations.com/games/
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