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Creatures in Japan
Feb. 5th, 2022 10:19 amI don't have a link for this – to the best of my memory, it was on the long-lost Gameware forums – but I seem to remember someone once asking: hey, Japan loves virtual pets like Tamagotchi, why not release it over there? And an employee replied, well, we did release the first one there, but we got in legal trouble with Creatures Inc (one of the companies involved with Pokemon), which was a pain, and anyway it didn't sell well once we did release it.
I remembered this recently when I noticed that ligfx had added some info to the charset.dta page on the wiki about the Japanese version of the Creatures 1 font, which made me curious about this Japanese version that apparently did exist.
But I had a heck of time tracking it down, until I had the idea to search the wiki again and found an old software release database page that had the name. It turned out that the reason I had such difficulty finding it was that I was taking the term 'Creatures' and adding keywords like 'norn' to narrow down results. But for some reason, in the Japanese version, 'norn' was turned into 'norm'! I'm not sure why that is, as the Japanese word for norns – as in the mythological creatures – is a simple transcription that sounds similar. 'Norm' in Japanese is a homophone for 'gnome', so maybe they were trying to evoke that to make them sound cuter or more familiar?
After that, I was able to find some auction and secondhand store pictures, but that was about it. If there were ever any Japanese fans, I couldn't find any trace of them on the modern web. And it doesn't seem terribly likely that there will be many more in the future; both the GOG and Steam releases of the Albian Years are listed as only being in English. (Does that mean the German fans are also out of luck?)
Here is the front of the box that I found:
Translation: Raising simulation - Creatures: The World of Norms
And the back:
Translation: Computer raising simulation software
Creatures: The World of Norms
The world's first virtual pets using artificial life are here!
Character:
The only virtual pet in the world with individual personalities
Because each and every "Norm" has different genetics, their personalities and habits are different. Let's think about an individual norm's character to teach and raise it well.
Learning:
They learn words, too
Norms have the ability to learn language, so if they are told the same word over and over from infancy, they can remember the names of things like objects, their owner, and even other norms.
World of "Norms":
Exchange norms with your friends via e-mail
Using email or floppies, you can exchange norms with other users. Or you can arrange 'international marriages' for your norms or put them up for adoption.
Born:
They have children
When norms grow up, they fall in love, lay eggs, and raise children. The newborn norms carry on the personalities and traits of their parents and form their own original personalities.
One thing I am very curious about is how the language aspect of the game was handled. Translating things from one language to another can be tricky for many reasons – for instance, in English we don't conjugate words based on gender of the speaker or target, but some languages do. (Actually, if anyone knows if issues like this cropped up in the Dutch/German/Italian/etc versions and how they were handled, I'd be interested to know!) An aspect that I could see being a potential problem is that Japanese typically uses verbs at the end of the sentence. Instead of saying 'Norn push food', you would usually say 'Norn food push'. I wonder if they re-arranged grammar in the Japanese version or not?
The one language-related thing I could see – as mentioned on the charset page and barely visible in one of the screenshots on the box – is that the norns apparently speak in katakana in Japanese. Japanese has two syllabic writing systems, hiragana and katakana. Even if you know zero Japanese, if I write the same phrase in both syllabaries, the visual difference is pretty obvious:
のーむたちのせかい
ノームタチノセカイ
Hiragana is on top; it's rounder and, well, cuter. Katakana is on the bottom; it's sharper. In fact, the dialogue for robot characters is sometimes written in katakana to give it a more mechanical feel. So it's a bit curious to me that they used katakana for creature dialogue, instead of the friendlier, childish hiragana. I wonder if either they wanted to emphasize the 'alienness' of the creatures, or if katakana was simply easier to read at the small font size required?
Anyway, this was all I could dig up. If anyone has more information, please let me know!
EDIT: I also found the archived version of the C1 Japan site, although there's nothing particularly interesting on there; some of the links go to the English version, and the archives show 404 errors by 2000. It looks like it may not have even been updated after the release.
I remembered this recently when I noticed that ligfx had added some info to the charset.dta page on the wiki about the Japanese version of the Creatures 1 font, which made me curious about this Japanese version that apparently did exist.
But I had a heck of time tracking it down, until I had the idea to search the wiki again and found an old software release database page that had the name. It turned out that the reason I had such difficulty finding it was that I was taking the term 'Creatures' and adding keywords like 'norn' to narrow down results. But for some reason, in the Japanese version, 'norn' was turned into 'norm'! I'm not sure why that is, as the Japanese word for norns – as in the mythological creatures – is a simple transcription that sounds similar. 'Norm' in Japanese is a homophone for 'gnome', so maybe they were trying to evoke that to make them sound cuter or more familiar?
After that, I was able to find some auction and secondhand store pictures, but that was about it. If there were ever any Japanese fans, I couldn't find any trace of them on the modern web. And it doesn't seem terribly likely that there will be many more in the future; both the GOG and Steam releases of the Albian Years are listed as only being in English. (Does that mean the German fans are also out of luck?)
Here is the front of the box that I found:
Translation: Raising simulation - Creatures: The World of Norms
And the back:
Translation: Computer raising simulation software
Creatures: The World of Norms
The world's first virtual pets using artificial life are here!
Character:
The only virtual pet in the world with individual personalities
Because each and every "Norm" has different genetics, their personalities and habits are different. Let's think about an individual norm's character to teach and raise it well.
Learning:
They learn words, too
Norms have the ability to learn language, so if they are told the same word over and over from infancy, they can remember the names of things like objects, their owner, and even other norms.
World of "Norms":
Exchange norms with your friends via e-mail
Using email or floppies, you can exchange norms with other users. Or you can arrange 'international marriages' for your norms or put them up for adoption.
Born:
They have children
When norms grow up, they fall in love, lay eggs, and raise children. The newborn norms carry on the personalities and traits of their parents and form their own original personalities.
One thing I am very curious about is how the language aspect of the game was handled. Translating things from one language to another can be tricky for many reasons – for instance, in English we don't conjugate words based on gender of the speaker or target, but some languages do. (Actually, if anyone knows if issues like this cropped up in the Dutch/German/Italian/etc versions and how they were handled, I'd be interested to know!) An aspect that I could see being a potential problem is that Japanese typically uses verbs at the end of the sentence. Instead of saying 'Norn push food', you would usually say 'Norn food push'. I wonder if they re-arranged grammar in the Japanese version or not?
The one language-related thing I could see – as mentioned on the charset page and barely visible in one of the screenshots on the box – is that the norns apparently speak in katakana in Japanese. Japanese has two syllabic writing systems, hiragana and katakana. Even if you know zero Japanese, if I write the same phrase in both syllabaries, the visual difference is pretty obvious:
のーむたちのせかい
ノームタチノセカイ
Hiragana is on top; it's rounder and, well, cuter. Katakana is on the bottom; it's sharper. In fact, the dialogue for robot characters is sometimes written in katakana to give it a more mechanical feel. So it's a bit curious to me that they used katakana for creature dialogue, instead of the friendlier, childish hiragana. I wonder if either they wanted to emphasize the 'alienness' of the creatures, or if katakana was simply easier to read at the small font size required?
Anyway, this was all I could dig up. If anyone has more information, please let me know!
EDIT: I also found the archived version of the C1 Japan site, although there's nothing particularly interesting on there; some of the links go to the English version, and the archives show 404 errors by 2000. It looks like it may not have even been updated after the release.
