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I didn't realise it going in, but 2023 was a milestone year for Shmuplations, the online repository of translated vintage Japanese game interviews: it's ten years old! The site was originally launched by founder and primary translator blackoak as an external host for the STG-related translations they'd been dumping on a certain STG message board, with the occasional dalliance into material covering other genres.

From 2015, the translations produced for the site have been largely crowdfunded via Patreon, with patrons being able to influence what gets translated from month to month; thanks to all those backers, the Shmuplations archive currently sits at almost 450 translations, with an ever-growing vault of material to potentially translate for decades to come, and while I'd like to think we can count on a certain level of public support for the foreseeable future, I certainly don't take anything for granted, so to anyone who's deemed Shmuplations worthy of financial support: thank you, and I hope it's been worth your while.

I've been helping out behind-the-scenes since... 2018, I think?, and while I sort of hesitate to talk on behalf of the site for fear of overstating my involvement—blackoak still does most of translations, handles all the money, runs whatever socials are out there, etc—I also know that blackoak's appetite for self-promotion is virtually non-existent, so I feel an obligation to be a little more assertive: not just for the sake of attracting backers or whatever, but because I really don't think Shmuplations gets the broader recognition it deserves for the sheer amount of material it has curated, and if I've gotta plant that flag, so be it.

Shmuplations posted another 27 interviews this year; read on for a run-down, and some other off-the-cuff observations from 2023:

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• an interview with an anonymous former Jaleco member that broadly covers various parts of their history, including Moero!! Pro Yakyuu (Bases Loaded), the origins behind the classic Jaleco "watermelon logo", Jaleco's dalliances with "moe" and more (2011)

• a pair of interviews with director Takashi Tokita and other leads on Square's Super Famicom omnibus RPG, Live-A-Live, which was recently remade and released globally for the first time (1994)

• a pre-release interview conducted soon after the public debut of From Software's original third-person mecha action game Armored Core, with a particular focus on the participation of mech designer Shoji Kawamori (1997)

• a lengthy retrospective from Satoru Okada, the former head of Nintendo R&D1 whose work history includes Nintendo's pre-video game era, the Game & Watch and heading up a long line of successful handheld hardware including the Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance (2022)

• an interview with veteran Nintendo director/designer/producer Yoshio Sakamoto that offers an overview of earlier games like Metroid, Famicom Detective Club and The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls, as well as the then-new Trade & Battle: Card Hero (2000)

• a joint conversation between two of Japan's first celebrity game desigers: Namco's Masanobu Endo, famous forXevious & Tower of Druaga, and a relatively green Shigeru Miyamoto, fresh off a little game called Super Mario Bros. (1986)

• an interview with director Makoto Uchida and other team leads on the making of Sega's over-the-top polygonal arcade brawler Dynamite Cop/Dynamite Deka 2 that covers the original Die Hard Arcade/Dynamite Deka, using new technology to modernise a classic genre & more (1998)

• a long interview with producer Masahiro Kumono and director Toru Shimizu on the making of Sega/Overworks' Shinobi revival for PlayStation 2, covering the new aesthetic, trending away from "action/adventure" in favour of pure action, global preferences in game difficulty and much more (2002)

• an interview with future hamburger model Bill Gates ahead of the imminent Japanese launch of the MSX, a Microsoft/ASCII-produced computer that hoped to pioneer a market for affordable, standardised home computing platform (1983)

• a short interview with comments from director Keiichiro Toyama, character/CG designer Takayoshi Sato and sound designer Akira Yamaoka on the concepts behind Konami's PlayStation horror game, Silent Hill (1999)

• another short interview with Hudson-side director Kenji Fukuya on the making of Hudson/Raizing's "beastorizing" fighting game Bloody Roar 2, including design concepts for the entire cast (1998)

• commentary from programmer Yuichi Toyama, designer Kenichi Yokoo and composers Kenichi Koyano & Atsuhiro Motoyama on the making of the Raizing/Capcom arcade STG Dimahoo/Great Mahou Daisakusen, taken from the liner notes of the official soundtrack CD (2000)

• a joint discussion between Shigeru Miyamoto and Toshihiro Nagoshi, then famous for Sega arcade racing games like Virtua Racing and Daytona USA, about the essence of fun, the evolution of game controllers, their day-to-day work, their favourite arcade games and more (1999)

• a breezy rundown of the desks of several prominent Japanese devs: Hideo Kojima, Satoshi Tajiri, Tengai Makyou & Sakura Wars creator Oji Hiroi and Artdink's Masaki Iizuka (199X)

• a pair of interviews concerning Square's Super Famicom dragon-raising strategy-RPG Bahamut Lagoon

• a collection of interviews with various members of Sonic Team on the making of their tokusatsu-infused futuristic firefighting action game for Sega Saturn, Burning Rangers (1997)

• a pre-release interview with director Yoshiaki Koizumi and producer Takao Shimizu on the making, and recent E3 showing, of their bongo-controlled Gamecube action game Donkey Kong Jungle Beat (2004)

• an interview with members of collaborators MuuMuu, Exact and Sony on the making of Jumping Flash! 2, the sequel to the early hit PlayStation 3D platformer (1996)

• an interview with designer Yoji Shinkawa that traces the beginnings of their career, working with Hideo Kojima and their contributions to the likes of Metal Gear Solid, Zone of the Enders and Policenauts (2001)

• a lengthy interview with veteran directors Hiroshi Miyaoka and Tomoki Tauchi on the history of the long-running post-apocalyptic RPG series Metal Max, including discussion of the series' multiple cancelled entries (2014)

• a pair of interviews with producer/director Tsuyoshi Kobayashi and art director Yoshihiko Arai on the making of Klonoa 2, the PlayStation 2 sequel to Namco's cult PS tearjerking action game, Klonoa (2001)

• an interview with director Fumito Ueda and producer Kenji Kaido on their just-released cinematic 3D action game, Shadow of the Colossus and how it relates to their previous game, ICO (2004)

• an interview with producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi on the original Gamecube release of Capcom's massively influential horror-action game Resident Evil 4, covering the game's shift in genre and the related anxiety among the team, the numerous scrapped versions and more (2005)

• producer Koji "IGA" Igarashi and director Takashi Takeda discuss the making of the 2005 PlayStation 2 action-adventure Castlevania: Curse of Darkness, going over the game's various character designs, its ties to Castlevania III, the un-rebranding of the series in Japan and more (2005)

• a translation of an article written by Ikegami Tsushinki programmer Hirohisa Komanome that details the planning and development of the original arcade version of Donkey Kong (1997), commissioned by Kate Willaert in association with Hit Save! and Gaming Alexandria

• an interview with Star Fox series creator Takaya Imamura and members of the Namco development team on overall direction and finer details of Nintendo/Namco Gamecube rail-shooter/TPS, Star Fox Assault (2005)

• commentary from game creator and former Shonen Jump editor Akuma Sakuma about entering the world of game development, their relationship with Yuji Horii, their work on the popular Momotaro Densetsu and Momotaro Dentetsu series and much more (2000)

...and that's all in addition to various externally-published/commercial commissions that I'm not sure I can fully divulge; I know I can say that blackoak's helped out on a few things for Game Informer, including this documentary on the making of Yugo Nakamura & Enhance Games' Humanity:

A few scattered observations/thoughts:

• the overall number of published translations is down from last year: this is partially due to some of them being very long and staggered over multiple updates, but also because there's been points where, due to life events, we were simply pressed for time and in a chronic state of catch-up, so for 2024, I'd like to be more mindful of banking stuff in advance so as to avoid further gaps in the schedule. That's easier said than done, given that it's largely up to patrons to decide on what gets translated, but I figure there's a lot of safe material that could drop whenever, and that it'd probably be savvy to try and time certain pieces alongside new releases/reissues or anniversaries or whatever.

• part of being behind the ball means that promotion/social media stuff also suffered, to the point where idk if we even told people about half the stuff that got published... and between that, blackoak's existing reticence towards social media and twxttxr going to shit, I don't know that we can afford to be so cavalier about it

• in my attempt to try and gauge which interviews did and didn't pop, I noticed a trend that reinforced something I'd kinda already realised but ought to take more seriously: so much of what ends up going viral from shmuplations is image-based, and often really basic stuff too. Like I said, I'd realised this to some degree, just from noticing how much better the illustrator-focused interviews or interviews with art-oriented outfits like Capcom and SNK tend to do over design-oriented articles or what have you, but seeing that very fluffy dev-desks interview pop off, or seeing that one Kirby developer doodle get ten thousand shares every other week, or even seeing the attention someone got for sourcing colour photos of someone whose only online photo was a shmuplations-sourced black-and-white copy, really put that into focus.

• • (By the way, if you've wondered on why shmuplations has so many black-and-white scans, there are multiple reasons, the big ones being a) blackoak sourced a lot of their material during a period when they were on a strict budget and pressed for time, which meant getting as many cheap meatball scans from the Diet as they could get in one session, and b) higher-quality images tend to attract copyright holders, so lower-quality images have actually proved to be advantageous in their own way.

• in last year's review, I expressed an idle desire to collaborate more with other preservation orgs, and we managed to do that this year! Credit where it's due, shmuplations was just one player in the initiative organised by Kate Willaert, so it's not like we actually did a whole lot to make it happen, but it did happen and it ought to happen again, not just with these collaborators but with all the others out there who are worth working with—I mean, there are plenty of outlets that aren't worth a damn that are capitalising off all our work, so why not show solidarity with the orgs that deserve it?

• ...which leads me to the topic of the minute, plagiarism: I have my own anxieties about how I share information that are sitting in a draft that'll probably never be published, but when it comes to shmuplations, I think my take's quite simple: I think the cottage industry of vintage game video essayists, news blogs, etc owe a huge debt to shmuplations, whether they're aware of it or not (and there are some in particular that must be aware of it). I don't want to say too much for fear of putting words into blackoak's mouth or attracting the wrong sort of attention, nor do I want to give the impression that I think shmuplations is anything but one source of many in this field, but when I see certain video bozos reciting interviews verbatim for way-too-large audiences, or these translations being used as the basis for translations into other languages, or I simply reflect on how many interviews are in the archive, it reinforces the notion that this work deserves more. More what? Like, financial compensation? Career opportunities? Acknowledgement from peers? I don't even know, but I definitely believe there's an imbalance, and I wish there was a way to address this in a more detailed manner that wouldn't come off like complaining about money or something.

• • This ties into my attitude about JP dev doujinshi and why I tend not to share any of that stuff online, either directly or via translation: putting aside how much of the stuff written in those things is explicitly not supposed to be shared with the broader public, I have zero interest in exploiting personal commercial writings for Content or whatever—there is a path to commercialising these writings in English that'll ensure everyone (but most of all, the author) gets to eat, gets the proper credits and, ideally, cultivates a larger audience that can help them produce or secure more ambitious or fulfilling work, and after so many years of thinking about this, I feel derelict in not having done more to make this happen.

I'm done blathering, so I'll leave you with this well-rehearsed plug: if you appreciate the work done by shmuplations and want to directly influence the direction and/or volume of translations that go up every month, please consider becoming a patron—or, if that's not feasible, just spreading the word via sharing the interviews, recommending the site for commissions/commercial work or just public shout-outs are all very much appreciated, and very useful insofar as they help indicate just how far this material might reach.

(oh and there's a simpler, more pull-quote-y 2023 rundown in the works for twxttxr, which I'll link here later, so go ahead and share that if you think it helpful EDIT: HEREHEREHERE)

Here's to 2024!