Over the weekend, a controversy was starting to brew concerning retro game publisher Retro-Bit. As spotted by Time Extension, game translator Krokodyl posted on their personal blog a series of photos that compared official Retro-Bit releases to previous fan translations for not only text but the specific font of the text and various UI graphics. It was a pretty damning case that seemingly confirmed Retro-Bit was reusing fan translations, and then not crediting the original parties involved. Yesterday, Retro-Bit confirmed that was the case, though it seemingly hasn’t been an attempt to fool anyone.
In a statement given to VGC, Retro-Bit acknowledged the claims and stated they were true. The publisher noted that it was responsible for “dropping the ball” with regard to the quality of its work and detailed how it didn’t take the proper time to verify that the submitted translation wasn’t fully original. The statement reads:
“We (Retro-Bit) have had success working with a number of translators and programmers to deliver each release. Unfortunately, due to schedule conflicts, we are not always able to work with them on every title. The translator who worked on these titles has a portfolio of translating entire text-heavy games, so we believed he was capable of our translation request since they were games that contained less text. We reached out to the translator for their explanation regarding these claims.”
“After our discussion internally we as Retro-Bit concluded that the final work submitted contained, to a lesser or higher degree, uncredited work. We’ve always had a successful understanding of our shared responsibilities with our collaborators and unfortunately in this instance, we let our guard down. This was an irresponsible oversight on our end and we take full accountability for this outcome and not verifying the submitted translation. To amend this situation, we will set out to reach those whose work was not recognized to offer a means of resolution.”
To ensure this doesn’t happen again, Retro-Bit has indefinitely delayed its upcoming releases so that it can avoid the problem cropping up again. As the company told VGC, this was done to “refine our translation and programming procedures.” The company then stated that one of the most rewarding aspects of doing re-releases is collaborating with the community and that it is deeply sorry something like this occurred.
Image source: Krokodyl
While it sucks that anything like this even went down, at least the company is taking responsibility for its actions. With how many retro projects the company has put out over the years, it seems things were spread too thin behind the scenes. Hopefully, Retro-Bit sticks to its words and we don’t see this issue reappear in the future.
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Written by Peter Glagowski
Peter has been a freelance gaming and film critic for over seven years. His passion for Nintendo is only matched by the size of his collection.
