Lunar and other Japanese RPGs · Sega CD / PlayStation / Saturn · 1993 · Japan → North America
Working Designs built its reputation localising Japanese RPGs — especially the Lunar series — with lavish packaging, heavy American humour, and famously long delays, under Victor Ireland's motto: "Delays are Temporary, Mediocrity is Forever."
Working Designs was an American publisher that specialised in localising Japanese role-playing games, strategy games, and shooters for Western release, and it became one of the most distinctive and divisive localisers of the 1990s. It is best remembered as the long-time North American publisher of the Lunar series, but its identity was shaped less by any single title than by a philosophy, embodied in company president Victor Ireland and his oft-quoted motto: "Delays are Temporary, Mediocrity is Forever" — a line Ireland liked enough to write into the PlayStation remake of Lunar itself. Working Designs' localisation style was unmistakable. Ireland maintained that the company stuck as closely to the original Japanese as it could while keeping the text understandable to American players, but it also freely injected quirky, distinctly American humour — pop-culture gags and jokes written to replace Japanese ones that would not land in English. Combined with elaborate, premium packaging (thick manuals, hardbound extras, pack-in items), this gave Working Designs releases a lavish, personality-heavy character that fans either loved for its craft and charm or criticised for straying from the source. The company's platform choices were as idiosyncratic as its scripts. Drawn to the storage of the CD format, it published for the Sega CD and TurboGrafx-CD rather than the more popular cartridge systems, and later ran into a wall with Sony: when Working Designs approached SCEA under Bernie Stolar, it was told the PlayStation had no interest in non-action games, pushing the RPG-and-strategy publisher toward the Sega Saturn for a time. Its business was always a niche one, chasing genres the platform holders did not prioritise. The flip side of Working Designs' devotion to polish was its notorious unreliability on timing. Releases routinely slipped by a year or more; the Saturn's Magic Knight Rayearth was delayed unintentionally for over three years, arriving as effectively the platform's last US game. That combination of beloved craftsmanship and chronic delay defined the company until a run of delays, approval problems, and weak sales caught up with it, and on 12 December 2005 Working Designs laid off its staff and became defunct. Its legacy is a template argued over ever since: the localiser as author, willing to trade schedule — and fidelity — for personality and presentation.
Working Designs treated localisation as authorship rather than transcription. Its scripts carried a recognisable voice — American, joke-heavy, willing to rewrite a gag rather than translate a joke that would fall flat — and its releases arrived as premium objects, thick with manuals and extras. To admirers this was craftsmanship: a company that cared enough to make each release feel special. To critics it was overreach, a localiser imposing its own personality on someone else's game. Either way it established a model of the localiser as a creative force in its own right, a debate about fidelity versus flavour that the industry still has.
Ireland's motto cut both ways. "Delays are Temporary, Mediocrity is Forever" justified the polish fans prized, but it also described a company constitutionally unable to ship on time — releases slipping a year or more as routine, and Magic Knight Rayearth arriving over three years late, after the Saturn it was made for had effectively died in the US. That perfectionism, colliding with a niche business chasing genres the platform holders did not want, eventually proved unsustainable, and Working Designs closed at the end of 2005. Its history stands as a case study in the real trade-offs of caring about localisation quality more than the market rewarded.