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Two days ago, Working Designs president Victor Ireland announced through the company's message board that Working Designs has gone the way of Ted Woolsey - a legendary localizer no longer in the business of video games.

Working Designs was a US-based game localizer that took many Japanese games - predominantly RPGs - and brought them to American shores. The small publisher gained a dedicated following and critical acclaim in publishing the English versions of Lunar: Silver Star Story and Lunar 2: Eternal Blue, in addition to Alundra, Dragon Force, Growlanser Generations, and many other small-time cult favorites. This "journalist" is particularly disheartened at the company's demise, for he has been praying for a Lunar anthology-style re-release for several years and also counts Dragon Force among his favorite Saturn games.

WD was rather notorious, however, for inflated prices and long delays for their titles, and a dwindling fanbase and increasingly poor sales for their games (notably the recent Growlanser Generations and Arc the Lad Collection) served as the final nails in their coffin. However, Victor Ireland has recently been in contact with Microsoft Game Studios in the interest of a Working Designs revival of sorts. Ireland is currently encouraging fans to write MGS directly telling them which Japanese older games they would like to see ported to the 360. It is difficult to tell if this Microsoft-Working Designs union will ever happen, however, so it's too early to rejoice (or despair, for you XBox haters out there).

Source: 1up

This post has been edited by laszlow on 14th December 2005 20:47

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Yeah, I heard about this. Even though they've fragmented off, hopefully they'll deliver some great RPGs to the XBOX 360 that aren't in the same vein as the last two Lunar (Legend/Dragon Song) games.

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It's gonna be a glorious day
I feel my luck can change

I'm sad, but this certainly explains the cryptic response I received to my news-seeking email last week. :-/

I really liked the Lunar series, but I also liked the Growlanser set. The battle system was amazing, and the first game (in the set; second in the series) in particular gave the player a large amount of control over the direction the plot took.

This makes me sad.

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Veni, vidi, dormivi.

Working Designs was located in the same city I used to live in. I guess I now have to give up the dream of actually finding out where in Redding CA they were located and paying them a visit.

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Elena Indurain

Currently Playing: Suikoden II