Personally, I've worked with Retro-Bit directly on my own projects, and I've had nothing but great experiences working with them. I really give them the benefit of the doubt here.
I think the likely scenario is that they hired someone who either cut corners or misunderstood what they could and couldn't use from existing works. It would be very hard for any company to validate the work (as seen by the effort it took for this to come to light). At some point you have to assume that the people you are hiring aren't just stealing other peoples work.
Edit: Story is now updated with official response from Retro-Bit
@damo I think something that is getting misconstrued in this article, based on some of these comments, is that Retro-Bit is not "denying" that this happened; they haven't commented at all yet.
The quotes in the article are from years ago, when the game was getting released; not a reaction to the current controversy. It might be worth clarifying that.
Comments 2
Re: Retro-Bit Accused Of Plagiarising Existing Fan-Translations
Personally, I've worked with Retro-Bit directly on my own projects, and I've had nothing but great experiences working with them. I really give them the benefit of the doubt here.
I think the likely scenario is that they hired someone who either cut corners or misunderstood what they could and couldn't use from existing works. It would be very hard for any company to validate the work (as seen by the effort it took for this to come to light). At some point you have to assume that the people you are hiring aren't just stealing other peoples work.
Re: Retro-Bit Accused Of Plagiarising Existing Fan-Translations
Edit: Story is now updated with official response from Retro-Bit
@damo I think something that is getting misconstrued in this article, based on some of these comments, is that Retro-Bit is not "denying" that this happened; they haven't commented at all yet.
The quotes in the article are from years ago, when the game was getting released; not a reaction to the current controversy. It might be worth clarifying that.