I was chatting to the folks at the Player One Podcast, who had pinged me about a recent podcast of theirs that talked to Square veteran Ted Woolsey about his Final Fantasy translation work, and I encouraged them to make a transcript as well - so they did, yay.

The full interview transcript is pretty interesting, especially for Final Fantasy nerds, and Woolsey reveals that there were no common text files to localize back in the tim of FFIII, youch: "I think there were about 1,300 pages of text and it wasn't contiguous. It was broken into pieces. People who were scenario writers would just take a chunk of scenario and dump it in. They would put in the code-in/code-out piece or headers there and they didn't care where it was. They just stuck it in a file and balanced it so it all fit in the different pieces."

Turns out Woolsey is working up at Real in Seattle nowadays, and has been for a number of years, and he's "...intensely looking at a lot of the platforms in Asia and thinking about how we can bring some of the more community and multiplayer features and platform features from those types of gaming experience into North America and into the casual game space. That's my focus right now. I'm the General Manager of the Online Game Initiative here. We're looking at a lot of things right now." Most interesting.

[UPDATE: Just randomly remembered that Frank did a Playing Catch-Up with Woolsey a couple of years back for Gamasutra, including this neeto tidbit about post-Square times: " Initially, Woolsey was looking at obtaining a license for Ed Roth’s Rat Fink for a racing adventure. “Great character,” he said, “but hard to pull off the necessary detail on the PlayStation, which the team was targeting.”"]