Today’s little retro gaming article (just on my NeoCities, no big feature article on my regular site this time) is about the newly released English translation of The Legend of Xanadu, Falcom’s 1994 PC Engine RPG, which has finally become accessible to English-speaking players after nearly 15 years of work.
Just a little look beyond the release announcement and explore the people and effort behind it, particularly John Brandwood (Elmer) and SamIam, who’ve spent literal years working through the game’s technical challenges, translating its enormous amount of dialogue, and even attempting a full English voice dub at one point.
I dug through some of their old development discussions and found a few interesting comments from years ago, including one from 2018 where SamIam insisted the project was never dead, despite the long periods of silence. There’s also a little about Falcom’s history, the original game’s development and why projects like this are such an important part of game preservation. Really enjoyed learning more about this one! Hope this is the right space to share it :)
P.S.
I know I’ve been writing and sharing a bunch of little articles here lately. Do let me know if you’re a bit tired of these.
Both my site and my NeoCities experiment are ad free (obviously, with the latter), so there’s no alterior motives when I share my writing here. But I do worry I’m just sharing them too much and becoming a slight annoyance.
Feel free to chime in and let me know if I’m annoying you all. I scrolled down the main page of this community and I see so many of my own posts. I don’t want to become a bother!