About the Swedish Versions Of "Shadowgate" And "Deja Vu"

During the late nights here in Sweden I have met some NES collectors on IRC. Until then I had never thought of the games "Shadowgate" and "Deja Vu" by Kemco, as rare games. To me, my swedish versions are just normal and not rare at all, but since I´ve talked to people in U.S the PAL-only, or swedish-only, games seem to be real rarities over there.

I got to know about this newsletter from a friend on the net who said it would be real nice if I wrote an article about the swedish releases of these games. It´s not that much info on them on the internet so here is my attempt to make the world a bit better!

I live in Sweden in Europe. Sweden is a country in the region of Finland, Norway, Denmark and Island (Scandinavia). Anyway, the company who import games to our region is called Bergsala. In 1991, when a new game called "Shadowgate" was to be released they decided to release a swedish version with swedish text. The reason was that the kids in sweden did not know english very well and were "unable" to play the game if it wasn´t translated. So, the 30 of may 1991 the swedish version was released here. The same thing happend with "Deja Vu", also an RPG like game from Kemco when it was released in 1992-09-24. Another game that also was translated was "Maniac Mansion", but since I don´t own that game myself I have no opinion about it and I won´t write about it in this article.

Now, how´s the swedish version of "Shadowgate"?

My answer… excellent even though there are a few spelling mistakes in the translation.

In the summer of 1991 a friend of mine had borrowed it and we played as much as we could. My mother alwas said that we had to go out in the sunshine and play football or something else but we couldn´t leave the game. So I guess Kemco made a good job! I don´t really know what to write about it except that it is totally translated into swedish. Oh, not everything was, text that was printed in the small square in the picture wasn´t translated. An example of that was "Rope" or "Epor" as it says in the game. If you have played "Shadowgate" you know the spell "Epor", the one you must use to get the rope rise in the cellar. When we played the game we did not now enslish that well and thought that "Epor" was just a magic word with no meaning at all. But now we know that epor was the english word "Rope" backwards. The swedish word for that is "Rep", and if it had been correctly translated the magic word should have been "Per".

Here, above, is a screenshot from the English version of Shadowgate and the spell "Epor".

On the left, the same picture but from the Swedish version! If translated word by word it reads: "Epor Epor…Suddenly you got it!! It is not a common word, it is a magic word!!"

The game is exactly the same as the english version except for the text. Nothing else is changed, the story, characters and graphics are all the same. I talked about misstakes in the spelling… there are a few, but that doesn´t make any sense when trying to understand. An example is the word "WALK", which is translated into "GÄ" instead of "GÅ", there is also another word misspelled. "HIT" should be "SLÅ" but is translated to "SLÄ". Mabye you´ll find it hard to understand these misstakes but it´s like "WELK" and "HYT" instead of "WALK" and "HIT", if you want something to refer to.

A screenshot from the swedish version of Shadowgate. Here you can see "SLÄ" and "GÄ" which are both misspelled words.

Here is a list of words from Shadowgate.

Look - Titta
Move - Gå
Open - Öppna
Use - Anv. (The whole word is Använda)
Leave - Lämna
Take - Ta
Hit - Slå
Speak - Tala
Self - Mig
Save - Spara

There is also a version of "Deja Vu" with swedish text. It also has some spellingmisstakes but they are not anything to discuss.

Here are some pictures from "Deja Vu", I won´t write as much about that game as I did about "Shadowgate" since the translation is almost like the one for "Shadowgate".

By Andreas Tinnerholm June 2000
Questions and/or comments are welcome at: inbox85@hotmail.com
Check out my webpage too: n64.exit.de/nesdedicated

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