IALWAYS wanted to make video games when I was a kid. My friends and I designed RPG board games using notebooks and graphing tools. When I reached high school, I learned more about programming, and mistakenly selected programming as my initial university major. A major in programming does nothing to prepare you for making games, and every graduate dreaming of that work never gets it.

It was by sheer accident I ended up being called to work on a game.

In 2003, Brandon Cobb of SuperFighterTeam ran across my work. He sent me an email to tell me his company was working on a C&E Soft game called “Beggar Prince” and needed a programmer to develop the tools to handle the text side of translation.

By that time, I had been working on game translations for seven years, so I accepted.

The game would be more accurately titled The New Prince & the Pauper, given the Chinese title is 新乞丐王子, a common Chinese rendering of Mark Twain’s famous novel, but SuperFighterTeam already purchased the trademark for Beggar Prince.

Regardless, it was better than C&E’s official name for the game: Myth on Light.

My job was to write a text inserter and an extractor to handle the script. Luckily, the Sega Megadrive tends to use 32-bit pointers, which made finding text locations quite easy. I authored tools to use the script as a lookup point to track down the code that calls it via pointers. All that was left was to dump the script, then insert it and change all the pointers, which were mixed in with game code. I also wrote some simple tools to work with the graphics.

There were a lot of difficulties with the pointer lookup method, and things got more and more complicated toward the end when English text flowed out of the buffer and overwrote program code. Needless to say, it was crash city.

The English translation was handled by Yu “Techmaster” Chen-shih, a Chinese guy from Taiwan who lives in Ontario, Canada. He did a good job on the script, but Cobb had to do a lot of rewriting. Like most RPGs from that era, especially the Japanese versions of Final Fantasy, it had one of the most flat, terrible scripts ever. To all who complain about games being rewritten for US release, count your blessings that you cannot read Japanese.

Beggar Prince took two years to pull together, and it was released for sale in early 2006. It was the first official Sega Megadrive release in the US and Europe in at least six years, and completely sold out three runs of cartridges, with the final cartridge sold on June 19, 2007.

The second run of cartridges fixes a bug which causes the Save Game option to fail on Sega Nomad units.

If you own the game and finish it, watch for my name in the credits. I appear as the first name in the “Programming” section.

Screenshots