Inside the Talented Nintendo Treehouse Localisation Team

By Jorge Ba-oh 14.09.2013 1

Inside the Talented Nintendo Treehouse Localisation Team on Nintendo gaming news, videos and discussion

Whilst much of the focus goes towards the team at Nintendo of Japan for the likes of Mario and Zelda, let's not forget the Treehouse.

The highly-secretive, talented team have spent hours, years putting their translation, cultural and localisation talents to a slew of Nintendo projects and games. From the smallest screenshot to the end product, Treehouse has paved the way for Nintendo's global success.

Kotaku recently visited Nintendo of America's offices to sit down with some of the team to discuss recent projects and their approach to development.

The group's origins came in the early 90s, where the initial staff worked on revising some of the text in SNES classic Donkey Kong Country for a US audience, with the game code-named "Treehouse", which inspired the group's name.

Treehouse gets involved fairly early when it comes to text-heavy games like Animal Crossing and Fire Emblem, but quite late for low-key text affairs like Wii Sports. At one point New Leaf has had 50 translators/editors working on that title alone.

"You get your text in there and you start playing through it, and the debug team is playing through it and sending you bugs, and you're fixing stuff that's wrong but you're also massaging stuff to be funnier, to be clearer, to be a better line here, a better line there. And that process… I really do think you just use every last drop of—until they're saying, 'We have to ship this game. We're cutting you off." - Nate Bihldorff

The features goes onto describe the smallest detail that takes a large amount of effort to fit and get right, for example naming a Legend of Zelda enemy or trying to strike a balance between Japanese and Western comedy situations.

Be sure to read the full feature at Kotaku.

Box art for Animal Crossing: New Leaf
Also known as

Tobidase Doubutsu no Mori

Developer

Nintendo

Publisher

Nintendo

Genre

Simulation

Players

4

C3 Score

Rated $score out of 10  10/10

Reader Score

Rated $score out of 10  9/10 (46 Votes)

European release date Out now   North America release date Out now   Japan release date Out now   Australian release date Out now    Also on Also on Nintendo eShop

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Comments

Excellent read! The guys at Treehouse really do a fantastic job - they're a big, big reason Nintendo's game always come off confident and polished. 

Can't imagine the work that goes into localizing something like Animal Crossing: 20 novels? That's an insane amount of work.

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