Fictional and Futuristic

In December of 2007 Capcom put out a duo of arranged soundtrack albums for Rockman’s 20th anniversary. The Techno Arrange album contained the following track, a remixed version of Elec Man’s theme featuring a female computerized voice delivering a speech on Rockman’s origin at around the 1:45 mark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBPCYVg45As

It is rather difficult to make out all the words spoken by the robotic voice in the track, so I’ve jotted them down here:

Rockman, came into existence due to the following timeline of events. In the fictional and futuristic year of the 200X master designer Dr. Thomas Light worked to create a humanoid robot. This robot would demonstrate an advanced artificial intelligence program that would allow it to make decisions based on vague commands and directions. He called the robot project “Robot Master”, because the resulting robot would be able to supervise the work of other, less intelligent machines.

One might notice some unusual inconsistencies in that speech for a product produced in and developed for the Japanese region, aside from the gratuitous use of the English language. For instance, the use of “Thomas Light” instead of “Right”, or the term “Robot Master” which is not used in Japan. Moveover, calling the character’s very history “fictional” seems like a strange choice. How did the artist come up with this script? Could it be the result of awkwardly running Japanese text through an online English translator, like Google Translate or (the now defunct) Babelfish?

As it turns out, it actually came from copying text almost verbatim from the “Fictional History” section of the Mega Man (character) page of Wikipedia, circa August 30, 2007. Strange, but then if they wanted something authentically recognizably English to say about Rockman as a sound clip, that wasn’t such a bad idea.

So, now you know.

6 Comments to "Fictional and Futuristic"

  1. 2015/04/02 Thursday - 7:09 am | Permalink

    Bravo. Love the research on your part. At the same time it seems kinda lazy on their part.

    • PiE's Gravatar PiE
      2015/04/02 Thursday - 7:18 pm | Permalink

      Agree with that last part 100%

  2. RADIX's Gravatar RADIX
    2015/04/02 Thursday - 10:35 am | Permalink

    Kinda strange that they’d turn to Wikipedia for something like this, but I’m not complaining. XD So, would this be the first time the term “Robot Master” was used in an official context in Japan?

  3. Dashe's Gravatar Dashe
    2015/04/16 Thursday - 1:34 pm | Permalink

    Great to see you posting articles again!

  4. 2015/04/20 Monday - 2:25 am | Permalink

    He’s back! And with a funny/informative article to boot!

    Never leave us again! ;_;

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