Marcus Lindblom

Marcus Lindblom is an American video game developer known for his English localization of the 1994 video game EarthBound. Lindblom spent his youth in the United States, and dropped out of college to move to Japan with his wife. After four years, he returned to college in the United States and began to work at Nintendo of America's call center. He eventually worked on Japanese-to-English game localization projects such as Wario's Woods and, most notably, EarthBound. Lindblom worked with a translator and a writer to accurately translate the game for a Western audience. He sought to stay true to Shigesato Itoi's script, but was given latitude to make the script as weird as he wanted, and so added in American cultural allusions. Lindblom considers the localization his highest achievement.

He worked at Nintendo until 1996, when he left to work at other developers including Electronic Arts, Vivendi Games, Midway Games, and THQ. He established Partly Cloudy Games with friends around 2009, and as of 2013^[update], runs mobile games studio Carried Away Games. After following the fan community from afar, he came out to fans in mid 2012 and the press began to show greater interest in his work. He had planned to write a book about the game's development, release, and fandom as a Kickstarter project before a reply from Nintendo discouraged him from pursuing the idea.