Can anyone tell me about this strange edition of lemmings?

[350970975]

It's an original floppy disc version but never seen a copy like this before... Any ideas on the language / rarity?

[namida]

The language is Korean, but I couldn't tell you anything about rarity.

[ccexplore]

The box and disks look very similar to the usual PC English edition, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's exactly the same as the English edition aside from the Korean on the box and possibly in the game manual booklet (assuming there's one).  The game itself is almost assuredly not localized to Korean since there'd be too many characters (ie. "letters of the alphabet", except it's not at all like that for Korean) to handle for most computers of the day, not to mention the display resolution is probably not high enough to legibly display those characters anyway.  (More to the point, I'm not aware that the game was ever localized to any other languages anyway, even Western European ones that don't have technical challenges.)

edit: I did notice they did actually bother to also update the "Lemmings" title logo on the disk labels as well, based on the photo.  Makes me wonder if there's a (extremely) slim chance that they might actually have updated in-game logo graphics as well?  Doubtful to be sure, but I guess there's no way to know without tracking down a copy.

[ccexplore]

It seems localization of the box may be fairly common more common than one might expect.  Here's one I found within the top 20 or so image search hits for "Lemmings Box" on Google.  Looks like Hebrew (but don't quote me on that, I'm no linguist).  I haven't seen another language though.

http://ftpmirror.your.org/pub/wikimedia/images/wikipedia/he/0/0c/Lemmings-BoxScan.jpg

[namida]

The game itself is almost assuredly not localized to Korean since there'd be too many characters (ie. "letters of the alphabet", except it's not at all like that for Korean) to handle for most computers of the day, not to mention the display resolution is probably not high enough to legibly display those characters anyway.  (More to the point, I'm not aware that the game was ever localized to any other languages anyway, even Western European ones that don't have technical challenges.)

The technical obstacles for doing this in Korean are much less than you might suspect. Although conventional Korean character encoding would probably have lead to problems, Korean is ultimately an alphabetic system (albeit one that combines the letters into a large character, eg. ㅎ ㅏ ㄴ [h + a + n] > 한 [han], the latter being a single character from a technical point of view, but three letters from a human point of view), so if one were to store it in a similar fashion to English letters (rather than storing the combined characters), and have some kind of code that handles rendering them in the more-conventional form, it could at least theoretically be done.

That being said, based on the lack of translation to even European languages, I do agree that it's highly unlikely in practice that they did such a thing. It's just not as much of a technical challenge as you suggest. (Chinese or Japanese on the other hand would indeed have the problems you mention.)

[Dullstar]

The game itself is almost assuredly not localized to Korean since there'd be too many characters (ie. "letters of the alphabet", except it's not at all like that for Korean) to handle for most computers of the day, not to mention the display resolution is probably not high enough to legibly display those characters anyway.  (More to the point, I'm not aware that the game was ever localized to any other languages anyway, even Western European ones that don't have technical challenges.)

The technical obstacles for doing this in Korean are much less than you might suspect. Although conventional Korean character encoding would probably have lead to problems, Korean is ultimately an alphabetic system (albeit one that combines the letters into a large character, eg. ㅎ ㅏ ㄴ [h + a + n] > 한 [han], the latter being a single character from a technical point of view, but three letters from a human point of view), so if one were to store it in a similar fashion to English letters (rather than storing the combined characters), and have some kind of code that handles rendering them in the more-conventional form, it could at least theoretically be done.

That being said, based on the lack of translation to even European languages, I do agree that it's highly unlikely in practice that they did such a thing. It's just not as much of a technical challenge as you suggest. (Chinese or Japanese on the other hand would indeed have the problems you mention.)

A lot of older Japanese games avoid the issue by limiting themselves to hiragana/katakana, and forgoing kanji altogether. There's still more of them than there are characters in English, but it's a lot more manageable.

I'm not sure how Japanese Lemmings ports handle this specifically, however - they could possibly still be English.