Adapting Kojima for America: Translation & Video Game Localisation in the 1980's

Anuraag Das Sarma

Founding Editor, Monograph

(Published in Year 6 Volume 3)

Boomers love Contra. When it came out in 1987, it was difficult not to, and over time, through repeated legitimisation in pop culture, it became the de facto video game of the 80’s - the narrative of a “lonely fighter saving the world” preserved in all its triteness. While Konami, for the original Japanese release, marketed Contra as a game set in the distant world of 2633, the American release significantly downplayed the futuristic setting; later releases of the game for the NES and PC would completely retcon the story - switching the future for the present and the Galuga archipelago for the Amazon jungle.

This was Rambo’s America, where the drugs were fresh, Vietnam was more than a distant memory, and the Mujahideens were political friends who’d help beat the Soviets. The Amazon jungles of the present-day were the perfect setting for a generation used to Ollie North, who at the time was trafficking arms to Iran in order to fund the Contras of Nicaragua. American audiences were used to proxy wars in distant rainforests, and Konami did not need a futuristic setting to sell the games in the West as they did in Japan. The change was also an extremely easy one, since the video game has no dialogue and no story. The plot existed only on the accompanying hard-copy manuals, and printing a few sheets of paper was an expense easily justified. They didn’t even change the final screen that plays out when the game ends. In both versions, it still read:

“Congratulations!

You’ve destroyed the vile Red Falcon and saved the universe.

Consider yourself a hero.”

The Japanese liked to imagine Red Falcon as this futuristic, evil-doing, nefarious organisation. The Americans liked to think of them as dirty commies. But just one change in the narrative meant Konami could sell copies either way.

1987 also saw the release of another Konami game - one that individuals today might be more familiar with simply because of the franchise it wrought. Metal Gear (no solid, not yet). 

Metal Gear, despite releasing in the same year, is a markedly different game from Contra. It was the first game Hideo Kojima would develop, and Konami did not necessarily have great ambitions for it. Kojima would go on to develop and direct the Metal Gear Solid franchise for the next 28 years, but in 1987, no one could have foretold the far-reaching effects MGS would have on popular culture as a whole.

Initially meant as a simple action game with military combat, the hardware limitations of the MSX2 (the platform for which the game was being developed) rendered the original idea ineffective. Kojima, the ever-clever developer, decided he would rather create a game focused on stealth - one that was heavily inspired by the 1963 Steve McQueen film: The Great Escape.

It was a hit, not only bringing tactical stealth games into the cultural zeitgeist but also creating a niche for cinematic videogames - something Kojima would go on to perfect in the coming years. But that first game in the series, the one that would birth a genre, was still not what Konami considered entirely fit for American audiences. In 1988, the NES port of Metal Gear would be released in North America. Published by Konami’s American subsidiary, the NES and Famicom ports start off with an entirely different cutscene. Instead of Solid Snake infiltrating Outer Heaven, the NES version has him parachute off a plane into a jungle in a style reminiscent of Stallone in Rambo II: First Blood (1985).

Unlike Kojima’s original, Metal Gear NES does not delve immediately into stealth. Instead, Snake’s first interaction after the radio call with Big Boss is an enemy soldier who dozes off to sleep the moment you step into frame. The MSX2 version, on the other hand, has you sneak past soldiers who are awake, alive, and ready to shoot from the get-go. The enemy, in this case, is good at their job, and Japanese audiences seemingly did not require their Solid Snake to depend on a guard’s tiredness.  

There were many more changes in the NES version, including jungle mazes which resembled Vietnam more than Kojima’s vision for a fortress 200km north of South Africa. The American version seemed much more attuned to American ideas of war than the global narrative Kojima would go on to forge in the years to come. Gameplay, too, underwent a significant change. The levels designed for the NES suffered from major issues, such as frequent backtracking. As enemies respawned every time you entered a room, it not only made stealth an extremely inadvisable strategy but also turned the entire game into one that was action-first. 

Both games suffered from erroneous translation; localisation errors would persist in later releases, but considering the nascent stage of video games (especially those made for home computers and consoles) in the 1980s, the translation mistakes did little but add some much-needed humour to the game. 

The franchise would really kick things off with Metal Gear Solid’s release in 1998, and as Kojima’s video games grew more cinematic through cutscenes and spoken dialogues, localisation and adaptation focused more on translating voice lines than editing game levels or design.

Jeremy Blaustein, the translator for Metal Gear Solid, writing for Polygon, explains his artistic vision in great detail and without him, that first MGS game might not have become as big as it did. While Snake’s constant habit of repeating words and framing them as questions would become a meme (as most things in Metal Gear Solid do), the gameplay remained entirely unchanged, and so did the story. The translator’s job thus became more difficult. As Blaustein put it:

“I felt like I was inside his [Kojima] head during the project, not unlike one of those FBI guys who track serial killers. And yet it became clear that Japanese culture is not as precise, brutal, or jaded about war as we’re used to in the United States. This was true even in the years before our culture was shaken up by 9/11 and Abu Ghraib. Reading Rogue Warrior and other books helped me understand how the military speaks to itself, and I wanted to show that Snake and Col. Campbell were professional soldiers. That had to come from how they spoke to each other, and the other characters in the game. ”

The translator’s job, especially in the world of video games, is a difficult one. Blaustein not only had to translate the words - he had to understand the underlying emotions in a Kojima game, he had to understand the archetypes of the characters, and then he would have to ensure that the translated lines would exactly match the cinematic edits that Kojima had incorporated into the cutscene down to the millisecond. And throughout it all, his translated voice lines would have to affect the English-speaking consumer in the same way Kojima’s affected a native Japanese speaker. No wonder he was taking valium and smoking cigarettes like a chimney throughout the entire process.

While originally appreciative of Blaustein’s translation, Kojima would later grow to dislike how different the localisation was for American audiences. As he became larger than Konami itself and MGS became one of the most popular video game franchises in the world, the publishers spent more time ensuring that his vision would explicitly shine through in all languages. This resulted in his dialogue often becoming the poster-boy for heavy-handed storytelling- doing wonders for the man, for no matter how many times I joke about the dialogue, there is something about Kojima’s love for absolutely bat shit insane plotlines and melodramatic exposition with a dash of camp that I would not trade for the world.

I have no doubt that had Blaustein continued to work as a translator for MGS, I would have still enjoyed the games and even loved the transcreated dialogue intended for American audiences, but then we would not have gems like this:

“Sad... So sad... A host of sorrows... And you are one of them. I am The Sorrow. Like you, I too am filled with sadness. This world is one of sadness... Battle brings death, death brings sorrow... The living... may not hear them. Their voices... may fall upon deaf ears, but make no mistake: the dead are not silent. Now you will know the sorrow of those whose lives you have ended!”

And I do not know how I would feel about that.