Marcus Lindblom
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Marcus Lindblom is an American video game developer known for his English localization of the 1994 video game ''
EarthBound ''EarthBound'', originally released in Japan as is a 1994 role-playing video game, role-playing video game developed by Ape, Inc., Ape Inc. and HAL Laboratory and published by Nintendo for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System as the second e ...
''. Lindblom spent his youth in the United States, and dropped out of college to move to Japan with his wife. After four years, he returned to college in the United States and began to work at
Nintendo of America is a Japanese multinational video game company headquartered in Kyoto. It develops, publishes, and releases both video games and video game consoles. The history of Nintendo began when craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi founded the company to p ...
's call center. He eventually worked on Japanese-to-English
game localization Video game localization (or computer game localisation), is the process of preparing a video game for a market outside of where it was originally published. The game's name, art assets, packaging, manuals, and cultural and legal differences are ty ...
projects such as ''
Wario's Woods ''Wario's Woods'' is a puzzle video game developed and published by Nintendo. It was released in Japan and North America in 1994 and Europe in 1995 for both the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. A spin-off ...
'' and, most notably, ''
EarthBound ''EarthBound'', originally released in Japan as is a 1994 role-playing video game, role-playing video game developed by Ape, Inc., Ape Inc. and HAL Laboratory and published by Nintendo for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System as the second e ...
''. Lindblom worked with a translator and a writer to accurately translate the game for a Western audience. He sought to stay true to
Shigesato Itoi is a Japanese copywriter, essayist, lyricist, game designer, and actor. Itoi is the editor-in-chief of his website and company '' Hobo Nikkan Itoi Shinbun'' ("Almost Daily Itoi Newspaper"). He is best known outside Japan for his work on Nintendo ...
's script, but was given latitude to make the script as weird as he wanted, and so added in American cultural allusions. Lindblom considers the localization his highest achievement. He worked at Nintendo until 1996, when he left to work at other developers including
Electronic Arts Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) is an American video game company headquartered in Redwood City, California. Founded in May 1982 by former Apple Inc., Apple employee Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer game industry ...
,
Vivendi Games Vivendi Games (formerly known as CUC Software, Cendant Software, Havas Interactive, Vivendi Universal Interactive Publishing and Vivendi Universal Games) was an American video game publisher and holding company based in Los Angeles. It was foun ...
,
Midway Games Midway Games Inc. (formerly Midway Manufacturing and Bally Midway, and commonly known simply as Midway) was an American video game company that existed from 1958 to 2010. Midway's franchises included ''Mortal Kombat'', ''Rampage (franchise), Ra ...
, and
THQ THQ Inc. was an American video game company based in Agoura Hills, California. It was founded in April 1990 by Jack Friedman, originally in Calabasas, and became a public company the following year through a reverse merger takeover. Initial ...
. He established Partly Cloudy Games with friends around 2009, and , runs mobile games studio Carried Away Games. After following the fan community from afar, he came out to fans in mid 2012 and the press began to show greater interest in his work. He had planned to write a book about the game's development, release, and
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as a
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project before a reply from Nintendo discouraged him from pursuing the idea.


Early life and career

Marcus Lindblom was raised in "a traditional, middle-class family". He dropped out of college, married, and moved with his spouse to
Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...
in the late 1980s. They planned to stay several months, but stayed four years before returning in 1990.


''EarthBound''

In the United States, Lindblom returned to college and, in 1990, began to work at
Nintendo of America is a Japanese multinational video game company headquartered in Kyoto. It develops, publishes, and releases both video games and video game consoles. The history of Nintendo began when craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi founded the company to p ...
's customer service and game assistance call center in
Redmond, Washington Redmond is a city in King County, Washington, United States, located east of Seattle. The population was 73,256 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. Redmond is best known as the home of Microsoft and Nintendo of America. The city h ...
. He would wake up at four a.m. to work before class, a schedule he considered "energizing". Upon his graduation, Lindblom became a Software Analyst at Nintendo, where he worked on their games. Lindblom later transitioned to work as a localizer, where he translated Nintendo's Japanese games into English for Western audiences. As standard for the time, he worked without a department and in direct contact with the headquarters, which gave him wide decision-making latitude. Lindblom worked on ''
Wario's Woods ''Wario's Woods'' is a puzzle video game developed and published by Nintendo. It was released in Japan and North America in 1994 and Europe in 1995 for both the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. A spin-off ...
'' before coming to the ''
EarthBound ''EarthBound'', originally released in Japan as is a 1994 role-playing video game, role-playing video game developed by Ape, Inc., Ape Inc. and HAL Laboratory and published by Nintendo for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System as the second e ...
'' project around January 1995. He took over for Nintendo of America's
Dan Owsen Daniel "Dan" Owsen is an American video game translator at Nintendo of America (NOA), best known for his role in the translation and localization of many Nintendo video games, playing a large role in the translation of ''The Legend of Zelda'' seri ...
, who had localized a tenth of the game's script before moving to another project. The game was roughly translated from Japanese by a translator, and Lindblom received a paper script with the translation. Masayuki Miura, a Japanese writer, worked with Lindblom to contextualize the English script for the mood and message intended by the game's original development team. Lindblom found his task of translating an "outsider's view of the U.S." for an American audience the hardest part of the localization. Nintendo did not want a direct translation, but a more American version of the script. He recalled that he was given latitude to make the script "as weird as ewanted" but also sought to stay true to the original text's translation, though he never communicated with
Shigesato Itoi is a Japanese copywriter, essayist, lyricist, game designer, and actor. Itoi is the editor-in-chief of his website and company '' Hobo Nikkan Itoi Shinbun'' ("Almost Daily Itoi Newspaper"). He is best known outside Japan for his work on Nintendo ...
(the game's creator) directly. Lindblom's own humor and office in-jokes worked their way into the script alongside cultural allusions to pieces of American pop culture, including cartoon character
Bugs Bunny Bugs Bunny is a cartoon character created in the late 1930s at Warner Bros. Cartoons (originally Leon Schlesinger, Leon Schlesinger Productions) and Voice acting, voiced originally by Mel Blanc. Bugs is best known for his featured roles in the ' ...
, comedian
Benny Hill Alfred Hawthorne "Benny" Hill (21 January 1924 – 18 April 1992) was an English comedian, actor and scriptwriter. He is best remembered for his television programme, ''The Benny Hill Show'', a comedy-variety show whose amalgam of slapstick, bu ...
, and musical mockumentary '' This Is Spinal Tap''. Outside of the game's script, Lindblom's in-game text includes the item and weapon names as well as the combat prompts. His writing contains multiple
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, such as in some of the character's names. One character is named after his daughter, Nico, who was born during the localization process. After taking the day off for her birthday, Lindblom recalled working for the next 30 days straight, without weekends off. He remembered the workload as large, and recalled "grinding-out" for about 14 hours a day. The localization process took four months. Lindblom credited Miura and the game's affirming "tone" as what helped him manage the magnitude of the project. He remembers the game as "very ositive at its heart and wrote it to be "a glass half full kind of game". When asked of his favorite contribution to the final work, Lindblom remembered the character Pokey's mother, Lardna. He described the name choice as "just the most ridiculous thing to have picked". Nicholas Dean Des Barres of ''
DieHard GameFan ''GameFan'' (originally known as ''Diehard GameFan'') was a publication started by Tim Lindquist, Greg Off, George Weising, and Dave Halverson in September 1992 that provided coverage of domestic and imported video games. It was notable for it ...
'', an original reviewer, wrote that ''EarthBound'' was translated "impeccably" and praised the game's humor. In the period following its release, the game's English localization has found praise. Localization reviewer Clyde Mandelin described the Japanese-to-English conversion as "top-notch for its time". ''
Kotaku ''Kotaku'' is a video game website and blog that was originally launched in 2004 as part of the Gawker Media network. Notable former contributors to the site include Luke Smith, Cecilia D'Anastasio, Tim Rogers, and Jason Schreier. History ...
'' found the localization "funny, clever, and evocative". The American localization team was devastated by the release's poor critical response and sales. Lindblom recalled that the game's reception was hurt by appearing "simplistic" in an age that revered graphics quality. He felt that the game's changes to the RPG formula—e.g., the rolling HP meter and fleeing enemies—were ignored in the following years. At the time of the game's
Virtual Console The Virtual Console was a line of downloadable retro video games for Nintendo's Wii and Wii U home video game consoles and the Nintendo 3DS family of handheld systems. The Virtual Console lineup consisted of titles originally released on pa ...
rerelease, he felt the game had aged well.


After ''EarthBound''

Lindblom worked on several other Nintendo games and left in 1996. He later worked at studios such as
Electronic Arts Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) is an American video game company headquartered in Redwood City, California. Founded in May 1982 by former Apple Inc., Apple employee Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer game industry ...
,
Vivendi Games Vivendi Games (formerly known as CUC Software, Cendant Software, Havas Interactive, Vivendi Universal Interactive Publishing and Vivendi Universal Games) was an American video game publisher and holding company based in Los Angeles. It was foun ...
,
Midway Games Midway Games Inc. (formerly Midway Manufacturing and Bally Midway, and commonly known simply as Midway) was an American video game company that existed from 1958 to 2010. Midway's franchises included ''Mortal Kombat'', ''Rampage (franchise), Ra ...
, and
THQ THQ Inc. was an American video game company based in Agoura Hills, California. It was founded in April 1990 by Jack Friedman, originally in Calabasas, and became a public company the following year through a reverse merger takeover. Initial ...
. Lindblom established Partly Cloudy Games with friends around 2009. The company has contracted with Microsoft and is also developing a
real-time strategy Real-time strategy (RTS) is a Video game genre, subgenre of strategy video games that does not progress incrementally in turn-based game, turns, but allow all players to play simultaneously, in "real time." By contrast, in Turn-based strategy, tur ...
Facebook game named ''The Robot Apocalypse''. , Lindblom runs Carried Away Games, a mobile games studio. He described many of the games he worked on in his career as "forgettable" and the eventual popularity of ''EarthBound'' as "satisfying". He cited the example of a wedding proposal done through hacked text in ''EarthBound'' as something he appreciated. After following the fan community from afar, in mid-2012, Lindblom approached the Fangamer booth at the
Penny Arcade Expo PAX (originally known as Penny Arcade Expo) is a series of gaming culture festivals involving tabletop, arcade, and video gaming. PAX is held annually in Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, and Melbourne. Previously, it was also held in San Anton ...
and explained his involvement in the game. When ''EarthBound'' was announced for the
Wii U The Wii U ( ) is a home video game console developed by Nintendo as the successor to the Wii. Released in late 2012, it is the first eighth-generation video game console and competed with Microsoft's Xbox One and Sony's PlayStation 4. The W ...
Virtual Console The Virtual Console was a line of downloadable retro video games for Nintendo's Wii and Wii U home video game consoles and the Nintendo 3DS family of handheld systems. The Virtual Console lineup consisted of titles originally released on pa ...
, the press began to show greater interest in Lindblom's work. Lindblom had planned a book about the game's development, release, and fandom as a
Kickstarter Kickstarter, PBC is an American Benefit corporation, public benefit corporation based in Brooklyn, New York City, that maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity. The company's stated mission is to "help bring creative project ...
project before a reply from Nintendo discouraged him from pursuing the idea. He did not plan to profit from the book, but felt he "owed" the fan community for its dedication. In response, he said he plans to continue his ongoing dialogue with the community. Lindblom told ''Kotaku'' that he thinks of the ''EarthBound'' localization as his "finest accomplishment".


Credits


Notes


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lindblom, Marcus American translators Mother (video game series) Living people Nintendo people People from Kirkland, Washington Video game developers Video game localization Japanese–English translators Year of birth missing (living people)