(A more forward-thinking person would've posted this here first, instead of doing it tweet-by-tweet and having to then think about how to reproduce it over here, but I ain't that dude)
I'm sure those of you with an interest in vintage Japanese video games are at least passingly familiar with shmuplations, which translates and archives little-seen developer interviews—the founder, blackoak, has been working on and off on these translations for the better part of a decade, and this year saw the archive cross 400 translated interviews. (I've been pecking away at the edges for a few years now, too, but the majority of the work has and still does come from them.)
blackoak is not one to toot their own horn, to the point where they often forget to tell people outside of their patreon that they're even posting things; I can sympathise, but I also find it much easier to talk up other people, so I make a point of finding moments to remind people of what shmuplations has accomplished in the hopes that others might, at the very least, share their appreciation for work that I feel is vastly underacknowledged relative to the amount of influence it has and continues to have on the broader game history sphere, as well as the specific cottage industries of video producers and content creators that regularly mine it for material (often with proper attribution, but regularly without, too).
As in years prior, 2022 saw 30+ interviews go into the archive, including a subtitled video interview or two; some definitely buzzed much louder than others, but you'd be forgiven for missing any or all of them, so allow me to run them down for y'all:
...plus some very short interviews that I can't quite remember, like these brief comments from Koji Kondo about the music of Super Mario Bros. 3.
Two other things worth mentioning:
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the site got a redesign which makes it much more readable on mobile, easier to tag/search articles and fixes a lot of backend issues; it now looks like a site from this millennium!
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shmuplations has picked up some commercial and private work here and there, some of which is public and some of which is not—one prominent collaboration was on Matt Leone's Like A Hurricane: An Unofficial Oral History of Street Fighter II book, an expanded collection of the Street Fighter series oral history you may have read on Polygon.
2022 was as big a year for shmuplations as any, and beyond the patreon suddenly blowing up, it's hard to imagine how it might grow or diversify... not that it necessarily needs to, mind. I see shmuplations as just one cog in the VG history machine that includes other independent orgs like Gaming Alexandria, VGDensetsu, Hit-Save, etc. and I do feel like there ought to be more coordinated collaboration between all these different groups, but I can't say it's something I've put a ton of thought into, so if you have any ideas, lay 'em on me.
Anyway, I say all that to say that if you appreciate the work done by shmuplations and would like to have a more direct influence on the amount of translations published every month, or the translations of specific interviews/features, consider becoming a patron—or, if that's not an option, please don't hesitate to shout out shmuplations whenever you come across something in the archive that you find useful or even just interesting... the fight for attribution is one thing, but beyond all else, it's just nice to be able to keep tabs on who the work is reaching and what other projects it might inspire.
(I feel like a patreon tier to vote on a new site name would keep the place afloat for another decade all on its own, but let's not get into that...)
Here's to 2023!
