The translation problem
The practical problems of translating Japanese games into English in the 1980s were significant and often inadequately resourced. Japanese and English have fundamentally different grammatical structures — Japanese verbs come at the end of sentences, politeness levels are grammatically encoded, pronouns are often omitted, and written Japanese uses three distinct character systems simultaneously. Translating a Japanese game script into natural English required not just language knowledge but cultural knowledge: understanding what a Japanese cultural reference meant to its original audience and finding an English equivalent that produced a comparable effect.
Nintendo of America handled early NES localisation with small teams that were often working under significant time pressure. The results ranged from excellent to legendarily bad. "A winner is you" (Pro Wrestling), "I am Error" (Zelda II — actually a coherent reference to a character named Errol in the Japanese version, transliterated differently), and "All your base are belong to us" (Zero Wing, Sega Mega Drive) became cultural touchstones of bad translation that circulated on early internet forums as examples of Japanese incomprehensibility. They were actually examples of poor localisation practice: insufficient time, insufficient staff, insufficient understanding of how the target language worked.
Censorship and cultural editing
Nintendo of America maintained strict content guidelines for all NES software released in the Western market. The guidelines reflected American sensibilities of the mid-1980s about what was appropriate for family entertainment. Religious imagery was removed — crosses became tombstones in Ghosts 'n Goblins. References to gambling, alcohol, and tobacco were edited out or replaced. Excessive blood was removed or recoloured. Sexual content was eliminated entirely. Human enemies in some games were replaced with robots to avoid the implication of shooting people.
The cultural editing went deeper than simple censorship. Ninja Gaiden's storyline, which in the Japanese version involved explicitly Nazi villains, was changed for Western release to make the antagonists generically evil rather than specifically fascist. Bionic Commando's enemies — Nazis in the Japanese version, down to the swastika imagery and Hitler as a boss character — became the ambiguously named "Badds" in the English version, their villain identity maintained but their historical specificity removed. The business decision was conservative: avoid controversy, avoid political content, maintain the family-friendly positioning that Nintendo had worked hard to establish.
The complete replacements
Some games that reached Western markets were not translations of Japanese games but complete replacements. Super Mario Bros. 2 in the West was not Super Mario Bros. 2 in Japan — the actual Japanese sequel, considered too difficult for Western audiences, was replaced with a reskinned version of Doki Doki Panic, a Japanese game based on a Fuji Television franchise. The characters were replaced with Mario, Luigi, Toad, and Peach; the gameplay was largely unchanged. Western players played the game for years without knowing it was a different game wearing Mario's face.
Tetris's Western versions were different games from each other and from the Soviet original in various respects — different music, different interface, different scoring — because the licencing chaos around the game meant different publishers in different territories produced essentially independent adaptations. The game was coherent enough in its core mechanic that these differences didn't matter to players, but the idea that there was one canonical Tetris is historically incorrect.
The professionalisation
By the mid-1990s, game localisation had begun to professionalise in response to the commercial scale of the market and the increasingly visible consequences of poor translation. RPGs and adventure games with significant text — Final Fantasy IV (1991), Chrono Trigger (1995), Final Fantasy VII (1997) — required translation teams working for months on hundreds of thousands of words of dialogue, item descriptions, and narrative. The quality of the localisation was increasingly acknowledged as a factor in the games' commercial and critical reception.
Ted Woolsey's localisations of Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger for Square are generally regarded as among the finest in the medium's history — capturing not just the meaning but the tone and character of the originals in English that read as natural rather than translated. His work on these games is credited with establishing the emotional impact those games had on Western players, an impact that might have been significantly reduced by less skillful translation.
The professionalisation of localisation coincided with a broader cultural shift in Western attitudes toward Japanese games: from the assumption that Japanese cultural content needed to be modified for Western audiences to the recognition that Japanese cultural specificity was often part of what made the games interesting. Games that arrived in the West intact — with their Japanese settings, cultural references, and design sensibilities visible rather than hidden behind American-market adaptations — often found that Western players were more interested in the Japanese original than publishers had assumed.