Marc Cellucci
Way back in the early days of Mission One, when the iPhone was as exciting and new as The Love Boat, a company called Micro Magazine contracted me to localize a property called P.S. Three-san.
An original web comic by an artist named IKa, P.S. Three-san took the hot game consoles of the time and reimagined them as pop idols, with their games being their “singles.”
The story follows an anthropomorphized PlayStation 3 and its struggles against the Wii, DS, and even its “big sister” PS2. At the time, it seemed like Sony wanted to take a page from the SEGA Saturn book, and come out with a hard-to-develop console that was more expensive than anything else, and this series pokes fun at the rocky launch of the PS3.
P.S. Three-san was somewhat of a hit, to the point where IKa put aside the magic of Microsoft Paint to make full-color strips, and everything was compiled into a series of books. Micro Magazine thought it might work in the West as well, and hired me to both localize the content and make an iPhone app out of it.
ABAP Baby, ABAP!
When starting the localization, I knew immediately what I was going to call the series. The title is very obviously inspired by the great Chad Warden, who is still to this day the funniest troll I’ve ever seen on the internet. He lit up fanboys like they were the GPU in an Xbox 360 (zing!), delivering filthy, offensive diatribes on how the PS3 was so much more ballin’ than the Wii and Xbox. I won’t post quotes here, but he’s eminently quotable, even if you couldn’t do it out loud in front of anybody.
Chad Daddy coined the term “PS Triple,” and to this day I still call the PS3 on my TV stand “Triple.” (It’s all about that Triple, baby!)
Bawlin’!
The app itself was easy enough to make, it was just a manga reader. The main challenge was the localization. You see, the original strips weren’t done with buttery, flaky layers of Photoshop goodness. So in addition to localizing the text, I had to go in and painstakingly edit each of the strips myself (no artists on staff back then) using my ghetto Photoshop skills. Thankfully the monochrome strips are all aliased, which made my job easier.
There were two major challenges with this project. The first was the localization itself — some of the humor just didn’t translate at all into English, so I often had to rewrite strips, or at least add Cellucci-fied embellishments to them in an attempt to be humorous.
The other big issue was trying to fit English into the tiny, vertical speech bubbles found in the comic. I practically wore out the hyphen key on my keyboard doing it.
Play Beyond
The protagonist is Triple, who was a new idol on the scene, and a lot of the story deals with her trying to fit in, and having trouble selling (at first). Some of the strips are straight up sad, like the one where Triple calls her mom (the PS1) and starts crying, or when a group of agents are talking behind her back, debating if she was necessary at all. The tone got much more lighthearted as the series went on though.
The main characters are as follows. In order to avoid any copyright issues (especially with a certain lawyer farm out of Redmond), I changed the names of each of the console idols.
Triple
Our hapless hero, trying her hardest to get her albums to sell. She is supposed to be the latest and greatest thing, but lives in the shadow of her mom and big sister, as well as the Wii character.
Double
Triple’s way more successful older sister. As is the fate of all pop idols, she is at the end of her career, and is about to be relegated to playing small clubs to a nice audience. She’s still the most popular idol of all time, though.
Whee!
The top-selling idol of the time. So new, so fresh, and an instant hit. There are lots of jokes involving her and her sidekick Lynk, who involuntarily moves as Whee! inadvertently moves her Wiimote staff around.
Saygah
Not a single console, but a representative of SEGA as a whole. Bold, brash, reckless, and prone to failing in spectacular fashion. So yeah, pretty much on point. Obviously this character is near and dear to my heart.
X-Locks
Maybe my favorite character. She’s the “idol from America” who looks cute, but has violent tendencies. In once scene she gets a teddy bear for Christmas, and named it Headshot. In another, her big sister X-Fox gives her a plush chainsaw, which she of course loves.
Dee S. and Pea
The top handhelds of the era. The DS was more successful than the PSP, so that’s the bulk of the humor, although there are plenty of touchpen jokes as well.
There are a lot of sub-characters as well, such as Dee Cast (sniff), ComCap, and Co-A, a character that let me vent about how many Warriors games Koei was churning out. (I spent one year at Koei, and that one year was enough.)
Triple Lives!
The app is another one of my digital mandalas that doesn’t exist anymore… but there’s good news! A kind soul who goes by RKasa has archived the entire series on the P.S. Triple Classic website!
If you are into awkwardly localized web comics about game systems come to life, mostly of which are lovingly rendered in MS Paint, then check it out.
