Some extra thanks


Video games like Ace Combat: Assault Horizon are a massive enterprise, with literally hundreds of people involved, most of whom are never seen by players.

In our case, the development of Ace was led by Mr. Kazutoki Kono, who directed the Project Aces team. You can read more about him and his thoughts, as well as meet some of the principal team leaders and other important folk, at this link here: http://ah.acecombat.jp/#/aircraft4 (The text is in Japanese; I'm not aware of an English version yet. Google Translate does a passable job under the circumstances, though obviously it's very much a machine translation.) The entire team all worked incredibly hard on the game, even pulling off an incredible string of near-24/7s for a month down the stretch.

Besides commending the team, I'd like to single out a few unsung heroes who personally helped me. Several people acted as translators, interpreting my American English into Japanese for the team, and vice versa. They have other roles at the company and will no doubt appear in the game credits for them, but I'd like to note my own acknowledgement and thanks. Not only did they have to decipher my extremely idiomatic English, but they also had to be learn and translate a variety of technical terms and concepts. And they often did this during long meetings and at odd hours.

The three most important translators for me in Japan were James Vance, Sum Tak Hau, and Norinobu Yoshioka. They were all extremely gracious and patient, most especially during our late night/early morning sessions. They were all full of good humor, especially Nori, who kept us all entertained with jokes and even tried to teach me a Japanese pun or two.

As I say, all have other jobs at the company - James, for example, was a developer and manager in his own right - but they worked overtime to help make our communications smooth.

(Yes, all three were generally present during the sessions - obviously I'm not that easy to understand...)

On the American side, Minako Takahashi took considerable pains to make sure that I understood the team and vice versa.

I owe all of them, as well as the rest of Project Aces and Namco Bandai, a huge thank you.