Trinen Talks Treehouse Origins

Bill Trinen has been out and about chatting about Nintendo of America’s translation department, known as The Treehouse. Well before his current role as Director of Product Marketing, Trinen was head of the localisation team at NOA. Talking about starting there in 1998, he said:

“The thing about Treehouse is that it’s actually a huge team [now]. When I joined Nintendo back in ’98, there were two of us,” Trinen shared with me. “We localized games, captured all the screenshots for promotional materials, wrote all of the manuals, captured all of the footage to help with T.V. ads for media…the list gets longer.”

The interview covers all bases, talking about his current role in internal marketing education, even touching on his first major public appearance as a translater for Shigeru Miyamoto himself. On his debut at the Game Devleoper’s Conference, he said that both he and Miyamoto were very anxious about getting up on stage.

“He was really nervous because he had never spoken in front of an audience that large before—and I was really nervous because I had never met Mr. Miyamoto. I can’t remember it exactly, but there was this little joke at the beginning… anyways, we got on stage, and he gets to his joke, tells it, I translate it, and the whole room just busts up.”

Make sure to check out the full article and interview over at Siliconera.