Victor Ireland

An example of Victor Ireland's writing found in Alundra. This line was removed before publication at the request of Sony.

Victor Ireland is the former president of Working Designs, a game publisher that handled the English localization and distribution of Japanese role-playing games in North America. Ireland had an editorial role in the production of the company's localized scripts, which he would rewrite with punchier dialogue that was suffused with crude humor and pop culture references. After the closure of Working Designs in 2005, Ireland founded the software publishing company Gaijinworks.

Ireland had a reputation for his incendiary posts in newsgroup and forum discussions, though he has become inactive following Gaijinwork's most recent game in 2017.

Victor Ireland's contribution to the Shining series constitutes a reinterpretation of the English script for Shining Wisdom that was originally prepared by Camelot translators Kei Kuboki and P. E. Jareth Hein. As part of his rewrites, Ireland changed the name of characters and locations from Shining Force II: The Ancient Seal and Shining and the Darkness. Although it was common for Ireland to alter names to suit his tastes, there persists an unsubstantiated rumor that Sega requested the names to be changed as part of an unknown rights dispute. There is no evidence that any such dispute occurred.

Magic Knight Rayearth

Magic Knight Rayearth started life as a manga series created by the art collective Clamp and serialized between 1993 and 1995 in Kodansha's Nakayoshi. TMS Entertainment, then known as Tokyo Movie Shinsha, produced an anime adaptation of the series, which began airing in 1994. Around the same time, Sega began development on a Saturn game directed by Phantasy Star veteran Rieko Kodama, which was to tie in with the anime. The game, also titled Magic Knight Rayearth, was published by Sega in Japan in 1995.

In 1996, Working Designs won the rights to publish the game in North America and began work on an English localization, but the game would not release until December 1998, making Magic Knight Rayearth the Saturn's final official release. Part of the reason for the delay was the necessity for Working Designs to rebuild parts of the game that had been lost by Sega due to storage failure, but it over a year's worth of delays were caused primarily by a disagreement between Working Designs and Kodansha and TMS over the names to be used in the game's English localization. Victor Ireland summarizes the process in a Usenet post from 1998.

If you want a rough timeline, here it goes:

Rayearth license is obtained, we plan to change the names

About 6 months later, we are told that we MUST use the crappy new names TMS has used in the ill-fated TV dub, since they're trying to sell it to TV. We refuse.

Much tug of war. (18 months or more)

Mixx contacts us to "sync" our versions of the translations. They will be doing the manga. They want to change the names, too. I explain that we are tired of fighting, and just want to use the original names, which Kodansha/TMS is still prohibiting. They agree that this is the best course of action, and we press for original names on two fronts.

We finally get to use original names.

In June 1996, prior to any conflict, Victor Ireland posted a thread on Usenet asking users to suggest new names for Working Designs to use for the characters in their localization of Magic Knight Rayearth for the Saturn. When TMS asked Working Designs to use the names from the anime's English dub, which also differed from those in the original Japanese, Ireland refused, favoring the names that he had created. In 1997, when the manga was being serialized in the English-language MixxZine, publisher Tokyopop chose to use names based on those found in the original Japanese manga. Work on the English localization of the Saturn game was finally able to proceed when Working Designs reached an agreement with Kodansha and TMS to use names matching Tokyopop's.

If Sega had anything to do with Working Design's decision to change any of the names in either Magic Knight Rayearth or Shining Wisdom, any evidence of their purported obstruction has not been found.

Things Victor Ireland Has Actually Said

Alundra's Bonaire

Victor Ireland discusses the Alundra character Bonaire in a 2014 GameFAQs thread.

[Boomerang78] Hey, could your friend get a screenshot of Bonaire's infamous line "the faith of a few and a little weed is all we need, bro" in Japanese? I'm curious as to what the original line says, specifically if it has any differences. . . .

[Ireland] Don't remember what the Japanese was, but I'm positive it was boring in comparison. There was no weed reference in the Japanese version. Most of the townspeople were quite vanilla in the original Japanese. But that's not really uncommon.

[Ajogamer] . . . While it's definitely apparent you played up the surfer dude/druggie personality in the US version, I was wondering, did that totally come out of nowhere, or was he a slacking layabout who took things in stride in the Japanese version as well? I'd assume his US personality had at least some basis on the JP version, . . .

[Ireland] No, Bonaire just looked like a surfer dude (to me), and his dialogue came out of conversations back and forth with Zach. He was basically a proxy for Zach, who wrote quite a bit in the game as well. As it went along, I encouraged him to turn up the volume on that character and make him a more exaggerated version of his secret self. The Japanese version of him was boring, and the name was different.

Sega's Alleged Theft of the Shining Wisdom Script

Victor Ireland has incorrectly asserted that Sega's European release of Shining Wisdom used his Working Designs script without compensation. The following posts come from a 2009 NeoGAF thread.

[Android18a] Were any WD games released in the UK/Europe? . . .

[Ireland] Psygnosis did our Alundra localziation (plus added other languages).

SEGA did our Dragon Force in Europe. We did a really cool transformation of the SEGA logo into the Dragon Force logo on the splash screen for them as well.

SEGA also, I hear, did some naughty stuff with Shining Wisdom for Europe they didn't pay us for.

That's it. Two legit titles, one partial illegitimately.

I do know that our LUNAR versions were amongst the top European imports, though.

Ireland repeats the same claim in a 2015 post on Gaijinworks.

[xelement5x] This reminds me, so I saw in another thread Vic, you mentioned that the PAL version of Dragon Force uses the WD translation, how did that work exactly. Did you guys just license that out to whoever published over there? Are there other games that use WD translations but are published by other companies?

[Ireland] There was a really cool guy at SEGA Europe (He's head of MS Third Party in Europe now) that really knew games that pushed to release our localization of DF in Europe, so we licensed it to them and they released it. That and Alundra (where we licensed our localization to Psygnosis for Europe) are the only LEGIT licenses we did for Europe, although I've heard that SEGA injected all or part of our localization into Shining Wisdom Europe without a license. Dunno if that's true and haven't really had the time or motivation to check it out.

Shining Wisdom and Bernie Stolar

In the Japanese version of Shining Wisdom, a searchable bookcase includes text referencing the Kingdom of Stormsang that was the setting of Shining and the Darkness. Ireland replaced this line with the following text.

What lies Beyond the Beyond? No one knows, for the journey is fraught with boredom and mind-numbing despair. Even the most enthusiastic adventurers became tepid and abandoned the quest.

In a 2015 post on the Gaijinworks forums, Ireland explains his feud with Sony's PlayStation manager Bernie Stolar and how it related to the joke about Beyond the Beyond.

[gauss1337] Today I got hold of a copy of Shining Wisdom for the Saturn and I laughed out loud when I saw the message regarding Beyond the Beyond and the "quality" of said title in one of the bookcases in the castle!

Was that in the Japanese game as well or was it edited by the WD team? As far as I remember Beyond the Beyond was also made by Sonic! Software Planning/Camelot?

[Ireland] Oh, no, that wasn't in the Japanese version. Doing mostly jRPGs, we were having trouble getting going with Sony (under the reign of Bernie Stolar and crew) around that time and the ridiculousness of the awful BtB getting approved and ONLY that title because of his anti-jRPG edict for PS1 inspired me to inject a little commentary into Shining Wisdom. I did that from time to time with certain other games.

Bernie was a total jerk and pox on both Sony AND SEGA, in my experience. I'll never forget the conference call we had where he essentially extorted like $30k from us. They shipped us a Japanese dev kit that didn't even work properly, and we were withholding payment for it until we got a fully working one, and he said we couldn't ship the game in QA (I think it was Albert Odyssey...) until we paid for the not-working-as-advertised dev kit in full. Total slimeball. It was clear he wanted us gone so he could kill off the Saturn in the US more cleanly, because we were still releasing wanted games.

I did get under his skin with reasoned logic he couldn't refute, though. Someone inside said he was seething when he came out of the office after the conference call. The maddest they'd ever seen. Good. He had no business running a console manufacturer and game publisher of that size. WAY out of his depth, and it showed eventually. I didn't make a friend that day, though, and for that I will be forever...indifferent. He was a jerk. ☺

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