SEGAGAGA (Finally) Gets an English Translation

If you’re a Sega Dreamcast fan, you know the legend of SEGAGAGA: a game about Sega’s triumph over rival game makers released right after Sega decided to stop making hardware.

(You can learn more about SEGAGAGA from Archipel’s excellent documentary – A DREAM CAST.)

A game without a home with deep references to Sega’s culture and Japanese humor? What Sega fan wouldn’t want to play this?

Thankfully, after many starts and stops, a Sega fan who goes by Exxistance took the lead on a team who fully translated SEGAGAGA into English:

https://github.com/ExxistanceDC/Segagaga-English-Translation

Apparently, a lot’s been made of the team’s use of AI for translation. I’m no AI sycophant, but the people and places I follow seem to gloss over this part in the translation team’s fully transparent AI Notice section. So I’m highlighting it here:

What I call the “playtesting translation” — a base translation that allowed the artists and playtesters to get started early and understand what they were working on — was developed using a combination of DeepL and ChatGPT 4o/4.5. That translation then went through a substantial, months-long human translator review. I don’t think that the end product feels “machine-translated,” but that’s ultimately for you, the player, to judge.

For the purists, we’re also offering the tools used to develop the translation, so if you are a translator who wants to do your very own translation of SEGAGAGA, you now have the means to do so! Check out the Resources section to get them.

The beauty of the fan translation community is that people are always refining and developing new translations and giving them back to the community. Go forth and prosper!

That’s the spirit of a good community at work. What an achievement.

My thanks to Exxistance and the entire SGGG Translation Team. I can’t wait to play this all the way through over and over again. And if you have a superior translation, put it out there, I’d love to play that one too.