- Joined
- Oct 20, 2024
- Messages
- 5,777
- Solutions
- 27
- Reaction score
- 28,193
- Points
- 11,177
- Location
- Vossen Estate 🇦🇷❗
I started "raiding" internet cafes in the Summer of 2004, having been introduced to the absolute wizardry that was broadband internet by a friend just a few months prior.
This meant a lot of things at the time, but it mostly meant that I was now free and able to download and keep games that were simply too big for me to get on my wimpy dial-up connection back home.
It should have been the answer to my nerdy prayers, but there was one problem: the vast majority of titles I had goshed over through yellowed magazine pages and crummy storefronts were, indeed, almost all there for me to get... But in a language I couldn't comprehend.
I didn't speak a lick of English at the time, so this treasure trove was largely out of reach for me. It felt like the ultimate tease.
You can then imagine the sheer size of my gargantuan surprise when I learned that two of the games I had wanted to try the most had been translated... By fans!
One was Strife -- a huge, semi-obscure FPS/RPG hybrid whose demo I had utterly loved as a kid but that I couldn't go any deeper in because of its quest-like format that required far more reading that I was able to provide as a seven-year-old.
The fact that someone had taken this utterly gigantic game with maybe thousands of unique lines of dialogues apart, had translated it, and then had published it anonymously on the internet for us to enjoy free-of-cost simply blew me away when I first stumbled upon it all those years back (and still kinda does, honestly).
The other example was Indiana Jones and His Desktop Adventures, a game so incredibly niche that the vast majority of Abandonware sites didn't even bother acknowledging its existence (or thar of Yoda Adventures, its sister game).
Again, that was incredible to behold... And the message was loud and clear: if gamers were willing to do this, then the only remaining question was what were they going to surprise us with next. And that? That's precious.
What about you? What was the fan project to awe-struck you like that?
This meant a lot of things at the time, but it mostly meant that I was now free and able to download and keep games that were simply too big for me to get on my wimpy dial-up connection back home.
It should have been the answer to my nerdy prayers, but there was one problem: the vast majority of titles I had goshed over through yellowed magazine pages and crummy storefronts were, indeed, almost all there for me to get... But in a language I couldn't comprehend.
I didn't speak a lick of English at the time, so this treasure trove was largely out of reach for me. It felt like the ultimate tease.
You can then imagine the sheer size of my gargantuan surprise when I learned that two of the games I had wanted to try the most had been translated... By fans!
One was Strife -- a huge, semi-obscure FPS/RPG hybrid whose demo I had utterly loved as a kid but that I couldn't go any deeper in because of its quest-like format that required far more reading that I was able to provide as a seven-year-old.
The fact that someone had taken this utterly gigantic game with maybe thousands of unique lines of dialogues apart, had translated it, and then had published it anonymously on the internet for us to enjoy free-of-cost simply blew me away when I first stumbled upon it all those years back (and still kinda does, honestly).
The other example was Indiana Jones and His Desktop Adventures, a game so incredibly niche that the vast majority of Abandonware sites didn't even bother acknowledging its existence (or thar of Yoda Adventures, its sister game).
Again, that was incredible to behold... And the message was loud and clear: if gamers were willing to do this, then the only remaining question was what were they going to surprise us with next. And that? That's precious.
What about you? What was the fan project to awe-struck you like that?
