As we learned through our wiki research, video games for Akira Toriyama’s Dr. Slump franchise date all the way back to Japanese microcomputers in 1983, a timeframe contemporary with both its original manga serialization and television series broadcast.
But when most people think of “Dr. Slump” and “video game” they think of the Sony PlayStation game simply titled Dr. Slump, developed by Natsume and released by Bandai in 1999 as a follow-up and companion to the 1997 television series and manga reboots.
In 2021, an English translation patch was released online from then-newcomer Hilltop Works, making the game much more accessible to a wider audience.
The game is a breezy adventure throughout Penguin Village (and time!), collecting items and chatting with Arale’s various friends and family, all with an eye-catching animation style that really uses the technology of the day effectively to bring the world of Dr. Slump to life.
Since the Dr. Slump patch, Hilltop’s output has included everything from a translation patch for the incredible Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 for the PlayStation 2, up through and including a fully-licensed and localized distribution of Milano’s Odd Job Collection on Steam.
We reached out to learn more about their work on the Dr. Slump game translation… and much more!
What’s your origin story? What brought you to translation and game hacking?
Basically, I was unemployed during COVID and I was looking for something to do. I had learned Japanese and I had a computer science degree lying around. This was a way of combining those two things with old video games that I loved. Even as a kid I wanted to see what was really going on in a game and how they worked. I wanted to know how to see past the edges of the stages in Super Smash Bros. The developer museum in Ratchet and Clank 2 really opened my eyes to some of the things that make a game tick behind the scenes — although, until I started fan-translating, I hadn’t actually tried to take a game apart or do any hacking. There’s quite a wall to overcome, but I had time and patience. I’ve been grateful for translation patches ever since I was a kid when I learned that the Pokémon Trading Card Game for Game Boy had a Japan-only sequel. It felt wrong that these games were kept out of our reach.
Why this Dr. Slump game in particular? Was there anything special about it that appealed to you?
The most stand-out feature of this game, and what drew me to it, is undeniably the visuals. This game took Toriyama’s art style and applied it perfectly to 3D — an incredibly difficult thing to accomplish on the PS1! Shunichi Taniguchi (the game artist) is amazingly talented. I’m a huge fan of Mega Man Legends and that specific flat-shaded style with cartoony pixel art faces really tickles me, and Dr. Slump is right up there with it. I wanted more people to be able to see and play this game so that it could inspire people. The humor is really good too! It was not easy to keep all the jokes and to make it still funny in English.
Dr. Slump was your first game translation/hacking project. What lessons did it bring along to future projects?
The project started off with extreme difficulty. There weren’t a lot of resources on how to get started. Before I could change a single letter of text I had to learn how to rebuild PS1 CDs, how to analyze proprietary data formats, how to decompile a compression algorithm, and more. There were months of learning before I could make progress. The good news was that basically all of that knowledge carried over to future projects. It turns out that almost every game uses its own personal compression format that you have to hack first.
What are some cool little things to be on the lookout for in the Dr. Slump game?
Here’s something fun: I played this game probably about a dozen or more times in the process of developing the English patch. Only one time did I get a secret scene involving Suppaman and the dinosaur, but I was so tired at the time that I’m not sure it wasn’t a dream. I looked through the text files, so I’m pretty sure it’s there, but I have no idea how you make that scene appear and I’ve never seen anyone else trigger it. If you ever get it, please take a screenshot and let me know how you did it!
In an era of absolute slop, what does a real translator bring to the table that AI or machine translation never could?
There are some people who only care if a game is “completable” or not. Those people can play an AI translation. Sure, maybe it will be “completable.” But personally, I have had a very strong connection to the story and writing of the games that I enjoy. A game like Xenogears or Mega Man Legends or even Paper Mario would not nearly have had the same impact on me if the writing wasn’t thoughtful, consistent, and written with intent. I care about immersion and the holistic experience of a game from beginning to end. AI translations strip that out completely, constantly exposing the bare metal of The Program with every missed context and AI-sounding phrase.
Bonus Question: Why is Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 so good?
A lot of its power comes from subverting expectations. You might go into it expecting a traditional “cozy” game, but it’s almost like it’s luring you into a false sense of security. By the end of the story, you will love the small town and the people there, but not for the reasons you imagined in your head when you first saw the game.
Hilltop has shared an incredible wealth of background information and walkthroughs on their translation and game hacking processes — in particular, their panel from Vancouver Retro Game Expo 2026 is a fantastic overview of how the sausage gets made.
Special thanks to Hilltop for taking the time to share their answers and expertise. They can be found on Bluesky and Patreon, while the patch for Dr. Slump can be found on romhacking.net.
One final aside: the Dr. Slump game supports Retro Achievements (which is compatible with this English patch), so start collecting all those golden poops!
