Working Designs
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| Defunct | |
| Industry | Interactive entertainment |
| Successor | Gaijinworks |
| Founded | 1986 |
| Defunct | 2005 |
| Headquarters | 18135 Clear Creek Road, Redding, CA 96001 |
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Key people
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Todd Mark, Sylvia Schmitt |
| Website | http://www.workingdesigns.com/ |
Working Designs was an American video game publisher that specialized in the localization of Japanese role-playing video games, strategy video games and top-down shooters for various platforms. Though the company had published many 'cult hits', it was known best to fans as the long-time exclusive US publisher of the Lunar series. The company was one of the few game publishers that attempted to bridge the cultural gap between the Japanese and American video game industries during the 1990s with an eclectic selection of releases from various genres, and was also one of the earliest American publishers to make use of the CD-ROM format for full, spoken English dialogue in their products at a time when voice acting was not a common feature in most mainstream games.
On December 12, 2005, Victor Ireland, President of Working Designs, announced via the company's message board that it was closing its doors. He later started a new company called Gaijinworks.
Working Designs published games for the Sega CD and TurboGrafx-16/CD due to the appeal of the CD medium, instead of the more popular cartridge-based Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Genesis. The company released some of their games with premium packaging for higher prices. They applied foil stamps and extensive artwork to their packaging and supplied games with full color manuals with anime artwork and concept art at a time when many game manuals for Western releases were in greyscale. Also, every manual came with notes describing the translation process and procedure of their games, usually found on the last page of the manual. Every edition of these notes closed with the signature phrase, "We're nothing without you!"
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