Kurt McClung is a Californian living in the south of France. His writing partner, Simon Mackenzie, is a Scot who has spent many years living in California. Together they make up a company called Taliespin that writes dialogue and plots for video games, among other things.

As they played the game and read the reviews from English-language PC gaming sites, they understood this was a big task. They were going to have to rewrite vast sections of Mars: War Logs, a role-playing game with plenty of characters and lots of branching dialog trees.

"Everything that could possibly go wrong between the French translation and the English production of the voices went wrong," says McClung. "Every single thing."

"When I first saw the original English translation, I just watched it in horror," says Mackenzie. "And it wasn't the horror that Spiders wanted, either."

"We laughed for quite a bit," says McClung. "And then I was really sad, because I knew how much work Spiders had put in it, a year and a half of their lives. This is the project they'd wanted to do from the beginning, when they created Spiders. This wasn't just some project they pulled off the shelf."

"Unfortunately, they [the French translation company] had just translated the words," Mackenzie says. "You can't do that. You lose a lot of the nuances of the language, the character and flavor of what's there and what the creators were trying to achieve."

McClung has been living in France for two decades but he rarely bothers with translation work. He and Mackenzie both prefer to create original content. But they had a relationship with the people at Spiders; they admired their work and the bold vision of Mars: War Logs and the writers who had worked on the French original.

"In France everyone loves them," says McClung. "They have the ambition to use games to tell better stories. That's totally French. We need that kind of company so that games go further."

So he and MacKenzie said, sure, we'll do this. They're writers. They understand the importance of words, the difference subtle changes can make. And they're gamers too. They want to see games that make use of all the tricks used in novels and TV shows and movies. The two writers believed they could create something that was true to the French original, that truffled out the emotions intended by its development team.

Spiders told them it needed to be done in four weeks.