As we charted the development of game localization over time, the lack of quality of early game translation became clear - a fact widely acknowledged within the gamer community. The initial poor quality resulted from the fact that some translations were literally done by a "programmer with a phrase book" at some Japanese game development studios (Corliss 2007). Not engaging a professional translator may well have been a legacy of the arcade game era, when very little translation was required, thus not warranting the engagement of a full professional service (Edge Online 2006). For example, to date the highly successful Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) title The Legend of Zelda (1986) is one of the most discussed games that created both gameplay difficulties and ambiguous and contradictory timeline myths due to alleged translation errors and discrepancies in different localized versions. Its English translations from Japanese generated numerous discussions among fans, as summarized below in a dedicated online discussion site:

Especially in the Legend of Zelda series, the history of translating a game from its native Japanese language into the English language is a shaky one at best. Some of the biggest myths in our community were created because of such translation discrepancies over the years. While in the modern era of gaming, translation has become rather superb, the roots of the Zelda series haven't fully recovered from the days of yore.  (Damiani n.d.)

However, as we have pointed out, a rather ironic fact is that even poorly translated games have sold well, as Kohler notes: “".….a better translation wouldn't necessarily equal more sales. So, many games that were written well enough in Japanese were rushed out the door in the US with English text that ranged from awkwardly stilted to embarrassingly poor" (2005, 210). Still today no clear correlation has been established between the quality of localization and the subsequent sales of a particular game (O'Hagan and Mangiron 2004), although there is a concern for the "image" of the publishers associated with poor translation (Darolle 2004). Even this point is debatable, given the fact that the recent popularity of online archiving by game fans and enthusiasts who collect erroneous translations has led to some game publishers capitalizing on their own vulnerability by deliberately retaining earlier errors in updated versions of the games. More interestingly from our point of view, the issue of poor translation has entered into the gamer community's consciousness and has become an ardent talking point (Newman 2008), prompting fan translation of games in some cases.