Okay, so this is weird news. If you’ve listened to our podcast religiously then you probably already know about this site’s unusual connection to the RPG Maker world. If you’re just joining us I’ll try my best to explain why today’s release of RPG Maker 2003 in English is kind of crazy.
You may not know this but RPG Maker software actually goes clear back to 1992. When RPG Maker 95 was released a Russian programmer operating under the screen name Don Miguel translated the program illegally. As you can imagine a Japanese program translated into English by a Russian dev didn’t come out spotless, but all things considered it actually worked pretty damn well. A few years later Don did the same thing with RPG Maker 2000.
Before he was giving the gift of breakfast, he gave the gift of RPGs.
RPG Maker 2000 was a huge hit and spawned a very large community. There are a lot of very successful games created using the program but because of its illegal translation no one was able to do anything on a professional level with them. So naturally when it was revealed the RPG Maker 2003 was being developed people began to petition the program’s publisher, Enterbrain, to release the program in the states so that everyone could stop making games illegally. Instead of making more money Enterbrain elected to shame everyone by announcing that they would not release RPG Maker 2003 in the US due to the piracy of the previous two versions.
This effectively split the community into two parts, those who accepted that they would just have to pirate RPG Maker forever, and those who abstained from 2003 in the hopes that they could show Enterbrain what good boy and girls they were, and how they definitely deserved a legal translation.
Now 12 years later we have it. This means that if you made an RPG Maker 2003 game back in the day, you can purchase a license and effectively sell that game without legal repercussions. Ignoring the fact that most RPG Maker games aren’t worth money at all, they also have a tendency of using ripped assets from other games, so this is still hairy at best. Nevertheless the option is there now for the first time in over a decade.
RPG Maker 2003 is available on Steam now for $19.99.
