A game was unintentionally listed as 'Sh***y Dungeon' on Steam in Japan thanks to goofed-up machine translation

In our current technological moment, when we're being urged by the world's largest companies to trust our lives to the whims of machines that might generously be considered "truth agnostic," it's important to check your work if you're letting a computer do it for you. It's a lesson that was starkly demonstrated this week for the developers of The Crazy Hyper-Dungeon Chronicles—or, as it was briefly known by Japanese Steam users, "Shitty Dungeon" (via Automaton Media).

The Crazy Hyper-Dungeon Chronicles is an upcoming pixel art dungeon crawler—one of those throwback titles boldly exploring the question, "What if a fantasy world was, you know, wacky?" It's got references to Skyrim. It's got a player character named "Hero Achille Williams Angelos McDurden." Sometimes the skeletons stick their tongue out all funny. You know the drill.

That tone, however, landed a little differently for Steam users in Japan, where the game had been listed with the title "クソダンジョン," or Kuso Danjon—literally "shit dungeon" or "crappy dungeon."

Unfortunate. And unsurprisingly, not intentional.

After presumably enjoying a series of sensible chortles, Japanese users contacted developer Fix-a-Bug on X and its Discord server earlier this week to offer a heads up that someone done goofed. Game programmer Giorgio Macratore received the news in good spirits.

"It wasn't intentional, but in Japanese, it ended up as 'Kuso Dungeon' ????," Macratore said on X via AI translation. "I'm working on fixing it... but honestly, I'm still laughing."

As to how the mixup occurred, it's safe to assume it was a faulty bit of AI localization. In a Steam news post following its nomination in the TGS 2024 "Selected Indie 80" showcase, Fix-a-Bug said it was offering a Japanese translation of the game's demo "as a gesture of gratitude," but made sure to note that "there may be some imperfections in the translation due to the limited time we had to complete the work."

In a Steam discussion forum thread about the short-lived alternate alias, a demo player from Japan said it had "a lot of unnatural expressions due to the machine translation." Even so, they said it didn't interfere with the gameplay, and were delighted enough by the "Shit Dungeon" name that they begged the developer not to change it.

Sadly, Fix-A-Bug replied that it decided to change the Japanese listing title to something more accurate, because "I can't tell my mom 'Hey Mom, the name of the game I made is Shitty Dungeon!'"