watching Initial D, playing Gran Turismo, and lusting
after Nissan Skylines. While Dr Slump was a solo project
for Hilltop, once he announced Racing Lagoon’s
translation, people who also love the game kept reaching
out to help. ‘Automotive consultant’ Syd-88 doesn’t speak
Japanese but has a decade of experience with Racing
Lagoon and is advising on all sorts of car terminology.
PancakeTaicho, who’s helping translate, lives in Japan
and actually tried to hack Racing Lagoon a few years ago,
but lacked the technical chops to pull it off. All told,
there are now eight people
contributing to the localisation.
Every successful fan translation of
a videogame is a tiny miracle, even
when they aren’t as long or bizarre as
Racing Lagoon. Each requires a
translator, someone fluent enough in
two languages to transpose both
literal meaning and style. That’s
already rare, but that translator also
has to understand the ins and outs of programming to be
able to decrypt a game and get to the text in the first
place. They have to be able to solve technical challenges,
like figuring out how to fit English letters into a space
designed for more compact Japanese characters. And
they have to do all of this on their own time, for free,
purely because they really, really like a particular
videogame. If a single person can’t handle every task,
they have to find a team with complementary skills and
the same passion willing to spend months or even years
working together just for the satisfaction of it.
Hilltop has found the process “hugely” fulfilling,
though, in a way no paying job ever has been. He studied
computer science in college but never became a
full-time programmer, and started learning Japanese
years ago by listening to tapes on his commute. “What
could I do with these two skills? It was fan translation,”
he says. “I wanted to do something with my life. I was
unemployed at the time, not really doing very well. And
I had never really produced anything – ever, really – for
public consumption or anything like that.”
For the first three months he was just trying to
understand how to hack into Dr Slump and wrap his
head around data compression, a
field of programming he didn’t have
any experience in. His notebook from
the start of that project is filled with
pages of assembly language code that
he was trying to debug. Finally he
understood it and was able to extract
the script. On Racing Lagoon, the
same process took only two days.
While most fan translators seem
content to treat it purely as a hobby, and others are
professional translators who take on the occasional
passion project, Hilltop is somewhere in the middle.
He started a Patreon for Hilltop Works, which states
that if he can get 600 monthly backers, he’ll quit his
job and work on translation patches full time. Hilltop
and his team are currently releasing new translation
patches every time they complete a chapter, and he
hopes to see a burst of interest – and support – when
thewholething’sfinished.
“IfI coulddothisforever,I would.100%,”hesays.“I
wouldmuch,muchpreferthistojustaboutanything.”
Wes FenlonTHE LIVERY Syd-88 dishes on some of Racing Lagoon’s iconic cars
R
“Your team leader boasts a machine
that’s normally unobtainable. It’s based
off the ’83 Nissan Skyline Super.”MINI
“Racing Lagoon has a host of imported
machines. This Mini, a 911, Camaro, and
more exotics await you...”MONSTER-R (R33 GTR)
“This unique R33 has a real-life
counterpart: built by a now defunct
tuning shop, it’s a proper monster!”LEFT: (^) Yokohama’s
identity eroding as
Western culture seeps
in is a running theme
in Racing Lagoon.
RIGHT: (^) Tr y PS
emulator Duckstation
if you want to crank
the resolution
up to 4K.
EVERY SUCCESSFUL
FAN TRANSLATION OF
A VIDEOGAME IS A
TINY MIRACLE
86-LEV
“Based on the Toyota AE86, your starter
car was modified for extra power over the
standard variants in-game.”
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