Somehow I missed Victor Ireland’s re-emergence last December. I shouldn’t be too surprised. It might be big news to me, but the return of a niche industry icon best remembered by a handful of geeks for his American localizations of niche videogames ten years ago isn’t exactly Edge Online headline news material. It’s sidebar at best.
For everyone reading who doesn’t smile when they hear the word Alundra, here’s the score. Victor Ireland co-founded Working Designs. After opening in 1986, Working Designs was one of the only publishers in the Western world devoted to localizing strange Japanese games, particularly those JRPG things we enjoy so much here at 61FPS. Working Designs translations tended to be a bit strange, littered with juvenile humor and American pop culture references. They serviced a very small audience; not only were they putting out games in an unpopular genre, they had a habit of releasing them for doomed consoles like the Turbo-Grafx 16, Turbo CD, Sega CD, and Sega Saturn.
Working Design’s golden age was when they started releasing Playstation games at the end of the 1990s. Now that there was a growing market for Japanese games, the publisher was able to put out some extravagant packages. (Most notably the PS1 releases of Lunar, Lunar 2, and the Arc the Lad Collection. They all game with cloth maps, hardbound instruction manuals, and even zany bonuses like boxing puppets.) By the time the Playstation 2 came around though, Working Designs was in decline. They released three games for PS2 and shut their doors in 2005. Irleand put an impassioned statement on the company homepage which you can read here. In 2006, he opened a new publishing house called Gaijinworks and then promptly disappeared into the ether.
Today, Vic and Gaijinworks are finally on the map for real. Their first game, a Hotel Dusk-style DS adventure called Miami Law, is currently being developed for America by Hudson in Japan. It’s the perfect cultural stew, considering the man’s history. I’m psyched he’s back.
(Link: Joystiq)
Related links:
Where is Victor Ireland?
FMV Hell: Lunar, The Silver Star
Sega CD on iPhone: I Like Where This Is Going
The One That Got Away: Arc the Lad