Adjustments in view of cultural contexts are not always initiated by official regulations. In order to publish and sell their products internationally some developers may deliberately seek universal themes and then customize the games for the target markets by including territory-specific content for each market to increase the relevance of the game to the market. For example, the SingStar series (2004-), a sing-off video game where players compete by singing along with the music to score points, is culturally localized at a macro level for different territory releases. Each game contains approximately thirty tracks, and some of the European localized versions such as the Spanish, the Italian and the German versions include popular hits from the target country so that players are generally familiar with them. There is also some degree of customization in the versions for English-speaking territories. For example, the version of SingStar Rocks (2006) released in Australia includes hit songs from Australian bands such as Men at Work. Another example of a series of games whose content was adjusted to be relevant to particular target territories is the Buzz! series (2005-) of quiz video games. In particular, the game Buzz! Brain of the UK (2009) has 21 regional varieties, including the original UK version, with different titles and content, but based on the same concept: a quiz about how well the players know their own country and culture (Relentless Software 2009). Car racing games are also subject to territory-specific adjustments. Games designed in Japan, with right-hand drive vehicle handling settings often need to be modified for North American and European markets (except the UK and Ireland). For the game Tokyo Xtreme Racer (1999), developers also included popular US-import car parts in the version for North America, and arranged a promotional deal with an import car magazine.
As one of the few early examples of a foreign game successfully breaking into the Japanese market, the Crash Bandicoot (1996-) series illustrates the benefit of taking cultural considerations seriously. The game became the first foreign console title to break the sales record in Japan by exceeding 500,000 units by May 1997 following its launch in December 1996 (Thayer and Kolko 2004, 481). Spurred by media speculation in Japan that this game, with its strong American flavour, would not succeed in the Japanese market, the game's American development team redesigned it based on feedback from Japan, especially from the game's publisher Sony (Carless 2004). The changes involved making the main character's appearance less threatening, as well as lowering the game's overall difficulty level by adding hints (Thayer and Kolko 2004, 481). The change in the design of the main character also included a modification from three claws and a thumb in the original US version, the style set by Disney and most Western cartoons, to four claws and a thumb in the Japanese version typical of Japanese anime characters (Kehoe and Hickey 2006). Edwards (2007, 29) believes the modification is mainly due to various negative connotations associated with four fingers in Japanese cultural contexts. Another interesting modification that Sony requested for the Japanese version of Crash Bandicoot was the replacement of the music for the battles against bosses with less nostalgic and more "video-game like" music according to Japanese expectations (Crash Mania 2008). Thayer and Kolko (2004, 481) attributed the title's record breaking success in Japan to "a significant localization effort that combines original cultural elements with country-specific elements" while the exact process of modification was driven by the nature of this particular game. They concluded:
上一篇：Game Localization as Rewriting
下一篇：Differences in Ratings of Game
微信公众号搜索“译员”关注我们，每天为您推送翻译理论和技巧，外语学习及翻译招聘信息。