Google Bombing was a popular activity in the early 2000s, as coordinated groups of people attempted to link humorous results to seemingly innocuous searches.
The search engine had mostly put an end to the practice by 2010, which means that the top result for “miserable failure” no longer points to a WhiteHouse.gov page about George W. Bush. But quirks in the algorithm can still cause trouble for people who don’t bother to read beyond the first few links. Author John Boyne, probably best known for writing The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, learned that lesson for himself recently.
This edition of Bite-Sized Game History will look at Boyne’s blunder, as well as Dragon Quest Builders, and remembering Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World: The Game on its tenth anniversary.
You can find a lot of dedicated video game historians on Twitter, and in 280 characters or less, they always manage to unearth some amazing artifacts. Bite-Sized Game History aims to collect some of the best stuff I find on the social media platform.
John Boyne has continued to write steadily since The Boy in the Striped Pajamas was released in 2006, and last month he published The Traveler At the Gates of Wisdom, a historical saga that begins in biblical times and spirals out into the far future.
While doing research for his novel, Boyne found himself in need of a recipe for red dye. Turning to Google, he searched for “ingredients red dye clothes” and copied down the top result. But instead of an actual recipe for red dye, he had lifted a paragraph directly from Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It seems that neither Boyne, nor his editors, ever noticed that the recipe called for Octorok eyeballs, Hylian shrooms, lizalfos tails, and keese wings.
This unfortunate mistake was first discovered by a Reddit user and boosted on Twitter by writer Dana Schwartz:
If those ingredients look weird to you, it is because they are straight of out of the Zelda game Breath of the Wild pic.twitter.com/JpebdXJqP1
— Dana Schwartz (@DanaSchwartzzz) August 3, 2020
Localization is a tricky business. Not only do you have to translate the script, but you also have to convey tone and nuance in another language that might not have the right words.
Other times you get the chance to toss in a pretty decent pun.
Hardcore Gaming 101’s JRPG Book has a great example from Dragon Quest Builders:
Localization comparison for Dragon Quest Builders. The subtitle in Japanese just says "the manipulators of fire and ice", but the English version reads "A Throng of Ice and Fire". A throng is a crowd, while the subtitle itself is a parody of "A Song of Ice and Fire" pic.twitter.com/zUSlnFm8bA
— JRPG Book (@JRPGBook) August 10, 2020
Finally we come to Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World: The Game, which celebrated its tenth anniversary (alongside the film adaptation) last week. While most Scott Pilgrim fans were reminiscing about the film, game fans continued to wonder why Ubisoft and Universal have never showed any interest in re-releasing the game. There’s clearly a demand from the public to revisit the critically-acclaimed beat ’em up, and there are even lots of new fans who never had the chance to try it out before the game was delisted from the PS3 and Xbox 360 storefronts in 2014.
You can count Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O’Malley among those who would love to see the game get a second life, and he shared some artwork he did for the game for the anniversary:
Some of my storyboards from the Scott Pilgrim game… I did a bunch of art and writing for it
— Bryan Lee O’Malley (@bryanleeomalley) August 10, 2020
[Tweet Removed – View at Internet Archive]
In an interesting twist, several days later, O’Malley jumped back on Twitter to confirm that Ubisoft had finally reached out to him to begin talking about re-releasing Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World: The Game.
That’s a great note to go out on for this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, so we’re done. Be sure to follow me on Twitter for more bite-sized history lessons in the future.