Prior to his interest in hacking Super Nintendo games, Sobodash’s dalliances with tools and malware he found online would occasionally land him in hot water.
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A self-described “script kiddie” who would use other people’s code to access unauthorized computer systems for fun, Sobodash started using bulletin board systems (BBSes) in his early teenage years. Sobodash was part of the first generation of kids who truly grew up online in the mid-to-late ’90s. There was some tears shed and friendships broken along the way, but the impact that RPGe had on the world of fan translations can’t be overstated. Sobodash and his compatriots may not have contributed to the hack itself to the same extent, but their promotion of the concept of English “fanslations” helped to inspire others to pursue their own projects.
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And on that note, it’s essential to understand that the final version of the famous ’90s FFV English hack you can download on fan websites today is almost entirely the work of three people, known as “Myria,” “Harmony7,” and “SoM2Freak.” However, prior to their involvement – which is well-explored in a 2017 Kotaku article on the topic – Sobodash and several other individuals in the nascent fan translation community were publicly working on a translation for FFV, and their project racked up thousands of views on the primitive internet.
His relationship with other members of RPGe, like Myria and SoM2Freak, would lead to disagreements, drama, split partnerships, and more, but their collective work would produce renowned fan translations that are still frequently played to this day. Of the members of RPGe, the group credited with producing the hack, none of them better reflect the heady days of early fan translation than Derrick “Shadow” Sobodash, a lonely high-school student who didn’t let his lack of technical expertise or Japanese knowledge stop him from tackling such a demanding project. The proliferation of this phenomena can be traced back to a handful of teenagers whose disagreements and messy ambition ultimately paved the way for one of the most notable fan-works of the 1990’s: a working English hack of Final Fantasy V. From the proto-Persona Shin Megami Tensei: if… to the beloved tactical RPG Bahamut Lagoon, many of the most obscure, yet beloved, foreign-language RPGs of the ’80s and ’90s have been painstakingly translated into English by hard-working amateurs. There’s a long lineage of RPGs whose well-known English translations stem from fans, not developers. Most notable RPGs from Japan and other countries in modern gaming get official translations for other territories at or soon after launch, but that wasn’t always the case.