Indie game wins 'Best Accidental Marketing' in Japan after title mistranslated as 'Sh***y Dungeon'

With all the indie games released on Steam every week, it can be hard to make your game stand out. Italian developer Fix-a-Bug has significantly boosted the pre-release popularity of its 2D dungeon crawler in Japan by unexpectedly naming the game “Shitty Dungeon” in Japanese.

Although the game's English title is The Crazy Hyper-Dungeon Chronicles, its Japanese Steam store page ultimately shows the title as Kuso Danjon. That means “Shitty Dungeon” or “Crap Dungeon” if you want to be more polite.

in a recent interview Game*Spark Found in AutomataDeveloper Paolo Nicoletti explained that the “bad dungeon incident” occurred in August this year, when the team was releasing a demo version of the game that had not yet received a professional Japanese translation.

When they realized their mistake, Nicoletti said, “Everyone laughed, and I laughed a lot about it, to be honest. It was completely unintentional.” However, the mishap didn't flush the rogue-lite dungeon crawler down the toilet. Instead, “it ended up getting the game a lot of attention and the wishlist count skyrocketed.” Nicoletti said the name change was “the best piece of accidental marketing” the developer could have hoped for.

According to earlier reports Japanese automatic machinethe Japanese Steam page of “Dungeon of Madness Chronicles” was named Shitty Dungeon as early as August 8. By August 13, Japanese-speaking users had begun discussing the topic on X and reporting the topic on the official Discord server.

It's unclear how or why this mistranslation occurred, but it's worth noting that when the game was selected for Tokyo Game Show's “Selected Indie 80” in September, its pre-release Japanese demo had some awkward machine translations. The developers announced that these issues would be addressed in the full version, and it appears that's when the “bad dungeon event” happened.

This interesting bug makes this indie game stand out from the rest of Steam's new releases. This quickly became a topic of discussion on Japanese social media. According to Nicoletti, this resulted in an increase in wishlists for games that were unreleased at the time. After all, a title that seems to proudly claim that it's bad will make people wonder if that's actually the case.

However, the quality of the game is not bad after all. “Crazy Dungeon Chronicles” currently hasMostly positive” Rating on Steam. Critics have consistently praised its entertaining dialogue, satisfying gameplay loop, and overall care in development.

Japanese speaking Commenters on X They also praised the demo and full versions of the game for being much better than the original Japanese version of the game suggested. “Literal humor” and “great and detailed pixel art” were among the praises lavished on the indie game. a japanese language review According to Steam, “Although the title “Shitty Dungeon” made me think it was a joke, it is actually quite well-made.” The reviewer said that because it was a blind purchase, “although it did not meet my expectations, the combat system is still quite interesting.” They also praised the game's balance between humorous dialogue and tense combat.

While good localization would be a better option, translation errors over the years have resulted in some strange and unforgettable dialogue. If not for mistranslation, these lines would never have become so iconic. Lines like Zero Wing's “All your bases belong to us” and Castlevania's Symphony of the Night's “What is a man? A bunch of miserable secrets” have transcended their source games and become well-known memes.

Verity Townsend is a Japanese freelance writer who worked as an editor, writer, and translator for the gaming news website Automaton West. She also writes about Japanese culture and film for various publications.