Remembering Working Designs

For those of you who grew up in the 90's playing video games, you may or may not remember Working Designs. They were a very niche company based out of Redding, CA that specialized in the localization of primarily Japanese RPGs, Side-scrollers and Shmups. President and founder Victor Ireland was one of the few figures in the gaming industry who truly pushed the envelope on his companies releases, and went beyond the necessary steps when localizing the game. Taking a play on Spinal Tap, the company's slogan was "Our Games Go To 11!", which couldn't have been more accurate.

Established in 1986, Working Designs wouldn't actually release their first batch of games until 1991. Due to the cost of cartridge production, they initially started out with games for the TurboGrafx and Turbo-CD consoles, such as Cadash, Exile, Parasol Stars, and Cosmic Fantasy 2. Eventually, the lack of support for the console in America and the lifespan and of the TurboGrafx came to a standstill, and Vic had to take his company to a new platform: Sega CD.

1993 saw the North American release of Lunar: The Silver Star for the Sega CD. I personally consider this (and it's sequel Lunar 2: Eternal Blue) to be two of the most essential RPGs of all time. Upon it's release, we were treated to thing never before seen in a role playing game; voice acting, animated cutscenes, a full score soundtrack (thanks to the Sega CD's Redbook Audio), and a cast of colorful characters that truly developed and grew as the game progressed. Working Designs' release of the game included a good amount of humor too, slightly less ironic and tongue-in-cheek as Earthbound, and more focused on pop-culture references. It was again, another element that hadn't really been seen in a video game at this point in time. Other cult classics such at Vay and Popful Mail saw American soil thanks to Working Designs as well.

Eventually the Sega Saturn and Sony Playstation came along, and with that came Working Designs and their renegade style of translation and publishing. Albert Odyssey, Magic Knight Rayearth, and Dragon Force were just a few titles that they released for the Saturn. The Playstation seemed to fare the best for Working Designs intentions with games like Vanguard Bandits, Silhouette Mirage, Alundra, Elemental Gearbolt, RayStorm, and RayCrisis. I believe Working Design's finest hour was with the releases of Lunar: The Silver Star Story Complete, Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete, and Arc The Lad Collection. They were like nothing ever before to come out in the U.S., with a Japanese style omake box filled with all kinds of goodies like maps, soundtracks, character standees, a necklace and a hardbound instruction booklet. It was a fanboy's dream to own one of these, and it truly displayed how much time and effort Working Designs put into their work. It was around this time they began running into some issues and backing themselves into a corner... their packaging was extremely expensive, which lead to higher cost to the customer (I remember spending $80 on Lunar 2!), and games were constantly being delayed. Magic Knight Rayearth was the final game released on the Saturn in 1998. Arc The Lad Collection had numerous unmet release dates, finally coming out in 2002... well into the lifespan of the Playstation 2.

Here's a prime example of how truly awesome their releases were.

Working Designs did very little on the PS2, with Gungriffon Blaze, Slipheed: The Lost Planet, and Growlanser Generations (another game complete with omake box and a plethora of extra goodies), which was their final release in 2004. A good majority of 2005 was spent attempting to get the rights from Sony to distribute the latest Goemon title, until August 2005 when Working Designs finally closed it's doors. It was a very sad day in the gaming industry. Sure, companies like Atlus, Square-Enix, XSEED and Nippon Ichi Software and others are still localizing J-RPGs for American audiences, but it's not the same. I remember personally talking to Victor Ireland via e-mail in my early teens and we'd joke around about how I wanted to work for him, even if it meant being his coffee boy. We'd talk about our favorite moments in Lunar, or other games that we'd like to see stateside, etc. It was really special that he went out of his way to talk to the fans... something that you won't ever see today. The magic that Working Designs emitted has unfortunately faded, and I am now very jaded in light of recent events (such as Nintendo's lack of interest in the Mother fanbase, when it's clearly huge and ready to empty it's deep pockets for the sake of the game). It's nice to sit back and at least have the memories of what things used to be like.

Vic started up a new company in 2006 called Gaijinworks, but there has been no announcements from them whatsoever... the website's been merely a title page for almost 3 years. However, there's rumor that Gaijinworks is going to be making an announcement within the coming months. We can only wait patiently. If I could sum up Victor Ireland, I'd say he was the Frank Zappa of the video game industry. Does humor belong in RPGs? Why, yes... it most certainly does. He did more for gaming than most people realize. Without Working Designs, we wouldn't have seen the likes of games such as Disgaea, or the Persona/Shin Megami Tensei series and there certainly would be no Katamari Damacy.

I hate to be so stuck in the past with gaming, but there's really not been a whole lot of good lately... and the graphics-intensive era we live in saddens me to no end.