Ryan Malesevich

amateur runner, technology enthusiast, and friend to all dogs

Interview

Interview with Victor Ireland on the Retro Hangover Podcast

Lunar the Silver Star (Sega CD)

Last month, the Retro Hangover podcast posted an episode where they interviewed Working Designers founder, Victor Ireland. The podcast is great and episode 298 is incredibly interesting. I’d recommend listening to it. However, I took the liberty to pull out some interesting tidbits that were shared about Lunar the Silver Star on the Sega CD.

If you don’t listen to the podcast, it came out because Victor Ireland wanted to get his side of the story related to the LUNAR Remastered Collection using a new translation and voice acting. He clearly cares about the products he put out and likely has a lot of insight, but be sure to note that this is his side of the story.

One final note, all transcriptions may not be perfect. Seriously, listen to the episode!

Dragonmaster Neil

Dragonmaster Neil? I loved this tidbit. I always noted that our moon is a Silver Star and Earth is very much like the Blue Star. Apparently, there were to be more connections between our world and the world of Lunar.

With the references that I put in Lunar that is related to our reality. Ghaleon being an ABBA fan. That kind of stuff. People would get upset about that. I know that they didn’t understand is that our world’s were connected, they were connected.

I had a snack, a drink, or a lunch. I just remember the venue with Shigema1. It was, I think between Playstation Lunar 1 and Lunar 2, or it might have been between Sega CD and Playstation Lunars. Shigema was talking about the Dragonmaster thing and how to play up the connection between our world and Lunar. And so he said that his original idea was to make the first Dragonmaster Neil, Dragonmaster Neil to connect it to our first man on the moon, Neil Armonstrong. But he chickened out and he decided to obscure it by making the first Dragonmaster Louis, who had arms so strong. So Louis Armstrong to connect the arm strong to the Neil and then players would get the connection between Louis Armonstrong and Neil Armstrong, the actual first man on the moon in our world.

But he lost the nerve to do it. He didn’t do Neil. He went with Louis. And I just think that was too obtuse for people to put together. So I think a lot of people didn’t make that connection. I asked him why he didn’t just go with Neil because I thought it was fine. I did’t really get a clear answer. I think it was kind of like a Japanese circular logic kind of thing, you know, on a problem. It’s a different way of thinking. But I came away from that meeting thinking that ok, Lunar definitely took place in a time before ours or an alternate version, which is why I made Ghaleon an ABBA fan and put other acronyms and references in the US release. I leaned into that really heavily and openly.

  1. I believe Victor Ireland is refering to Kei Shigema

Posted on: 09 December 2024