Game Boy Color · 2001 · China · Rebranded Hack
Chinese pirates rebranded the Japanese monster-collecting game Telefang as fake Pokémon titles, producing legendarily incomprehensible Engrish, anti-piracy sabotage that broke saving, and a generation of children who bought them thinking they were rare Pokémon games.
Pokémon Diamond and Pokémon Jade are bootleg hacks of Keitai Denjū Telefang, a pair of Game Boy Color monster-collecting games that had been released only in Japan — Pokémon Diamond being a rebranded hack of Telefang's Power Version and Pokémon Jade of its Speed Version. Chinese pirates recognised that Telefang's creature-catching premise superficially resembled Pokémon, slapped Pokémon branding onto the cartridges, and sold them internationally, where they were widely mistaken for legitimate, obscure entries in Nintendo's franchise. The bootlegs are most infamous for their translation, which is one of the great disasters in the history of localisation. Evidence suggests the text was first translated from Japanese into Chinese and then from Chinese into English, compounding errors at every stage and carrying the mistakes of the intermediate translation into the final product. The result is a game whose dialogue is largely grammatically intact yet almost entirely incomprehensible in context, littered with bizarre non-sequiturs and even occasional profanity. Lines from the games have become beloved internet curiosities precisely because they read as an alien parody of English. The cartridges were also plagued by serious technical failures. Most copies simply cannot load a saved game — a defect that turns out not to be a bug at all, but the consequence of anti-piracy protection built into the original Telefang, which the hackers failed to fully defeat. The games were further riddled with genuine bugs and game-breaking glitches entirely absent from legitimate releases, making them not merely strange but frequently unplayable. The deception was remarkably effective and long-lived. For years these cartridges circulated on auction sites such as eBay masquerading as rare Pokémon games, and countless children received them as gifts from relatives who had no way of knowing the difference. Today Pokémon Diamond and Jade are celebrated as perhaps the most famous bootleg games ever made — objects of genuine affection in retro circles, valued not despite their broken translation and sabotaged saves but precisely because of them, as monuments to the strange creativity of the piracy underground.
Being perhaps the most famous bootleg games ever made, beloved for a translation so broken it became an internet legend.
The bootlegs' infamous script appears to have passed through Chinese on its way from Japanese to English, and each hop compounded the damage. The result is dialogue that is often grammatically well-formed yet completely meaningless in context — a stream of confident, fluent-sounding nonsense punctuated by bizarre word choices and the occasional profanity. Unlike a merely clumsy translation, Telefang's reads like a dispatch from a parallel reality, and its lines have been quoted, screenshotted, and celebrated online for decades. It is the definitive example of what happens when localisation is performed with no reference to the source material and no editorial oversight whatsoever.
Beyond the language, the cartridges suffered a crippling technical flaw: most cannot load a saved game at all. This is not incompetence in the ordinary sense but the residue of anti-piracy protection built into the original Telefang, which the hackers never fully disabled — the game's own defences quietly punishing the pirates. Combined with an assortment of genuine glitches absent from legitimate releases, this made the games frequently unplayable. Yet the deception worked for years, with the cartridges passed off as rare Pokémon titles on auction sites and gifted to unsuspecting children, cementing Diamond and Jade as the most notorious bootlegs in gaming.