Jeremy Blaustein

• 1. Introduction

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  Jeremy Blaustein was born in 1966, the younger brother of Maddie Blaustein. Their family was Jewish, though the record says little else about how that childhood shaped what came later. That sibling connection is one of the few personal details attached to a man better known for the words he wrote than his own name. What pulled him from that quiet personal history into translating some of the most recognized Japanese games of the 1990s? And what eventually carried him from that early work all the way to a career built in Japan itself? The games he translated speak for him more clearly than any biography does.

• 2. Localizing Konami's World

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  Metal Gear Solid, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Silent Hill 2 all carry his translation credit from the same general stretch of the 1990s. He worked as a localizer and translator of Japanese media for western, English speaking audiences, most notably in the mid-to-late 1990s on Konami video game titles. Alongside those three, his major video game translation credits include Contra: Hard Corps, Dark Cloud 2, Dragon Warrior VII, Eve of Extinction, Kamaitachi no Yoru, Shadow Hearts, Shadow Hearts: Covenant, Silent Hill 3, Silent Hill 4: The Room, Snatcher, Suikoden II and Valkyrie Profile. Shenmue appears on that same list too, though only for casting rather than translation. Beyond the games themselves, he also translated anime series and took on the Pokémon anime and movies as part of that same body of work. He did not only write the words; he sometimes voiced them too, working occasionally as a voice actor and as a motion capture stand-in. Those Konami credits from the 1990s would not be his last screen work. Television later brought his name to a different kind of audience.

• 3. Family, Japan And Television

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  He currently lives in Japan, where he serves as president of Dragonbaby, a Japanese based video game localization agency. Running that agency places him on the business side of the same industry his earlier translation work grew out of. His television credits stretch well beyond his early work on the Pokémon anime, formerly one of his listed projects. Those television credits include Funky Cops from 2003-2004, Ninja Warrior from 2008-2009 and Muscle Rankings from 2008-2009. Each of those later credits sits far from the Konami games that first made his translation work known. Dragonbaby, the agency he now leads from Japan, is where the next unfamiliar Japanese title gets chosen for an English speaking audience.