in the US? Mario bros 3 wasn’t even out in the US when they released the super nintendo with super mario world in japan. Why? The same thing with pokémon.
Why did nintendo release their games 2 years late
in the US? Mario bros 3 wasn’t even out in the US when they released the super nintendo with super mario world in japan. Why? The same thing with pokémon.
They thought it would be funny
Translation and localization took longer. Mario 2 had just released when 3 hit Japan. Why butcher sales?
how many lines did they have to translate? 2 pages? seemed stupid
It makes a bit more of a difference when the games were to tightly packed in the cart space that changing any bit could break the whole game, and you had to work around tight character limits to translate from a much denser language.
The translations aren't hard-baked into the code, anon. Yes, not even in the 80s
>Translate in game text
>Manuals and booklets
>Do market research and change the box art to sell better in foreign marketplaces
>SNES carts were different shapes in different regions, so you have to produce new carts
It's a big job.
The frick? QRD on why they did this?
Why not? Different production factories and sourcing
Different TV's from different regions on earth used to have different settings (frame rate, etc). So they had to design them to work slightly differently on different consoles, and didn't want you to be able to plug in a game that wouldn't work on your console.
You must be really young.
That doesn't even make sense, differences in TVs have to be considered in the signal the console sends to the TV, not in how it reads its own cartridge
Well they made it both.
The games themselves had to be adapted to the regional differences. I’m glad we have digital now because PAL games often ran slower (PAL had lower refresh rate but higher resolution). The Megadrive sonic games I remember were 30% slower than the NTSC version. To this day, the sonic theme in the NTSC versions (used in modern ports) sounds sped up to me.
Yeah I suppose that makes sense, after all even the ROMs are either PAL or NTSC
Also just cause someone called me underaged earlier, I'm 32 but I only ever had a PS1 and a PC so I never cared about any of this
>This isn't anywhere near as common nowadays, but back in the day they used to change a ton of random shit
I remember bragging to my friend cause my PS1 looked like this and he had the angular one, lel
>I remember bragging to my friend cause my PS1 looked like this and he had the angular one, lel
Funny thing is, the original PlayStation didn't need to be that big to begin with. There was a ton of empty space inside, the motherboard is roughly the same size for both models.
I assume they made it bigger because consumers at the time thought bigger = more powerful.
There’s hardly any usable free space at all, are you ignoring the inbuilt power supply?
The psone is also smaller due to not having a complete internal power supply, and by having less ports on the back.
Did what, different shapes? Because they thought a more aggressive shape would sell better in the US. Even the console itself was different: it was more colorful in Japan.
In Europe, the console (and cartridges) was the same as the Japanese version. But game boxes were more similar to American ones.
This isn't anywhere near as common nowadays, but back in the day they used to change a ton of random shit because they thought it would fit that specific market better. They even changed the name of the entire console:
Family Computer (Famicom) became Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in the US. And then the Super Famicom became the Super Nintendo.
The Sega Mega Drive (Japan and Europe) became the Sega Genesis in the US.
not only that, but bugfixing and rebalancing.
often the worldwide releases were better games.
It wasn't just Nintnedo my zoomer friend
The hardware and cartridge format was different between Famicom and NES.
Because it used to take a really long time to release games internationally.
How underage are you?
>I believe this lie
i’m watching game historian and they hid the news of the super nintendo to keep sales of the NES going obviously they could have sold it in the US within 6 months or a year at most
>hid the news
You fricking moron
>I'm watching a YouTube video so I know more about what you lived through.
I have no idea what insane shit he's babbling about but yes, in general this is true because those kinda videos incorporate multiple sources whereas you only have your own localized experience to go by
>you didn't know about the SNES in Japan
research and reports are more accurate than your childhood memory and “they just couldn’t do it just cuz i said”
Listen OP, you fricked up and its time for a lesson.
>there is one territory
It’s like zoomers that watch the Chris chan documentary act like they were there and tell you to mind his pronouns
>his
SNES came out like 10 months after Super Famicom. Yea maybe they didnt hype it up in Nintendo Power when it came out in Japan but, you know, you could read the WSJ or something and learn about it.
The fact is they kept the NES going too long and let NEC get a foothold in the market in Japan, and Sega in the USA. I think they realized the mistake.
The good old days was also the bad old days.
Most of the snes RPGs didn't make it to Europe for example, hell the adventure island series took 6 years and 5 sega wonderboy games later to get a pal release on nes
It's ok we got Lufia 2 and Terranigma which were by far the ebst SNES JRPGs so we wo over burgers.
Because distribution and translation teams were not as in place as they are now. This wasn't just a Nintendo thing either, it was global.
I still remember when English got Minish Cap before Japan, that was fricking odd.
we did?
Different market, every game took forever to get localized before the mid 2010's
And to this day less mainstream games still take a good while to get localized
Man wait till you hear what Square did to their games back then!
>stil have to deal with morons calling FF6 "FF3"
Well seeing as square called it FF3 here I would say you are the moron
>nooo you must study video game industry lore like a nerdy moron!
3/10 try harder
My moronic friend, up until about 2007 games were still released with a delay. I distinctly remember waiting for Resident Evil DS in 2006, came out in Japan in Jan but didn't arrive in EU until March
to hype it
Super mario bros 3 ended up selling 18 million copy
Bro as a kid I had no idea what was out in Japan
I found out about new games through commercials
Super Mario bros 3 had a whole movie to shill it
Pokemon took a while as they didn’t know if it would be successful enough to port, and for the international release they redid all the in game Pokemon sprites.
Now I remember Kirby 64 being noted as "coming soon" in my Nintendo print mag every month for years because Nintendo somehow couldn't be arsed to shit out the PAL version for so long.
It's really odd to see someone have no comprehension that things were different 20 years ago. Did you know the internet use to be linked to phone lines too?
I don’t think Zoomers understand how much more distant the world was back then. The internet has really connected the world, back then calling Japan would cost a lot just for a phone call conversation. Shipping internationally wasn’t what it is today, not even close. Even in the last 10-15years things have changed. Many people don’t think the whole coronavirus thing would have happened a decade earlier simply because international travel with China has ramped up significantly even when thinking about the early 2000s vs. today. Japan in the 80s was not somewhere people had the kind of open easy contact with that we have now, it was entirely doable of course and did happen but the channels just were not set up for things made in Japan to quickly be sold in America, it took years and the boomer marketers back then had to change everything for American consumer tastes. It seems crazy today but selling anything remotely anime or Japanese looking wouldn’t fly, you had to change that artwork and everything to get Americans to buy in, or at least that’s how all the marketing people assumed it had to be done. By the late 90s turns out those Japanese art styles actually felt fresh and unique and maybe the marketers were being idiots the whole time trying to make it all blend into what Americans already were used to. Had Dragon Quest looked like DBZ rather than just some DnD art I think it would have stood out more and made a bigger name for itself but that’s not what the boomers selling this stuff to kids thought at the time.
Doesn't help Japan itself was and still to an extent is, slow to adopt new technology infrastructure. I still get fricking floppy discs from them for investor files.
>I still get fricking floppy discs from them for investor files.
No you don't.
I do. Usually a pack of 20. Some provide password locked optical discs luckily.
Prove it
They're in the office, don't be silly.
It's only once every three years when we have a CDD refresh.
>No proof
Didn't happen then
>Japan itself was and still to an extent is, slow to adopt new technology
Are you moronic? Japan had HDTV in 1989.
In terms of its business infrastructure, which I thought was implied.
Not in operations, no. Consumer level is different to corporate level, which is what was being discussed in terms of their operating procedures for some.
Another important aspect zoomers of today forget is that with the internet, it's much easier to "organize". i.e. if you somehow find out a game released in Japan but not in the USA, what were you gonna do in 1990? Call your congressman?
Today they just spam the company's PR on twitter
Fricks me up to think that people of OP's age literally can't grasp how the world used to be before mainstream internet use, he's lived in a world where basically everything is immediately accessible, I'm old enough to remember the hellish wait of Gold and Silver getting localized. The world used to be a much bigger and more mysterious place.
And a much more fun place. I wish we could go back to getting information through TV and magazines. Not having internet would slow the world drastically but we’d all be better off for it.
Americans take a lot longer to learn gameplay concepts, so it was deemed beneficial to stagger releases to give them more time. It's different today because we have the internet -- Americans would get really pissy if they saw that they were being left out of initial releases.
Same reason Japanese didn't get many FPS titles for a long time.
This was a common thinking at the time, but a lot of times, the translation involved making the game a lot harder. Not for any psychology reasons but to limit the ability of people to rent games and beat them.
more time to learn a game that they couldnt play, you might be on to something. a crack pipe most likely.
back then NOA wasn't involved in translation or localisation until the game was done
also they probably had only 1 guy doing the translations
also it was a tedious process because it was basically rompatching by hand and making sure you didn't break the game by overwriting something else