"Murder" to "Murdar": Two Point’s Localization Journey into Turkish
Simulation games are perhaps the most prolific genre in the gaming world. Every year, countless new titles arrive with dreams of running a farm, building a city, or managing some elaborate system. Standing out among them isn’t easy. But the Two Point series, developed by Two Point Studios under SEGA, has carved out a unique space with its quirky personality. Two Point Hospital, Two Point Campus, and the latest gem, Two Point Museum, have each earned a special place in players’ hearts—not just through gameplay, but with their witty dialogue and playful tone. And now, this world finally speaks Turkish.
The first game in the series, Two Point Hospital, delivered its hospital management experience with a twist of absurd humor, making players chuckle from the very beginning with diseases like “Starstruck.” Unfortunately, this delightful game didn’t launch with Turkish language support. But the second installment, Two Point Campus, more than made up for it. We didn’t just translate menus—we reimagined the humor, jokes, and cultural references in Turkish.
Instead of doing word-for-word translations, we aimed for creative adaptations that preserved—and even enhanced—the game’s sarcastic, playful tone. When the developers asked for extra attention on the randomly generated NPC names, we saw it as a challenge worth embracing. The goal wasn’t to simply localize the names into Turkish, but to find fitting surnames that matched the characters’ archetypes—be they goths, jocks, or nerds—while also provoking a smile, a frown, or a moment of amused confusion. One example: a character with the surname “Murder” became “Murdar” in Turkish—a phonetic twist that’s close in sound but loaded with local flavor.
We brought the same approach to Two Point Museum, the latest in the series. This time, the themes were even trickier: museums, archaeology, and history. The game already came packed with brilliant humor—students taking selfies with dinosaur bones, staff dressed like they stepped out of a time machine, and grumpy archaeologists obsessed with mystical rocks. Our mission was to make that humor feel closer to home. Not “their” jokes anymore, but shared ones Turkish players could laugh at too. We rewrote the radio voice lines to reflect their personalities in Turkish, and localized creature names with our own twist. For instance, the fossil “tapraptor” looked like a centipede, so we transformed it into “kırkayaktor,” a pun combining the Turkish word for centipede (kırkayak) and raptor. That level of localization—full of wordplay, creative terms, and culturally attuned dialogue—was our goal from the start.
We had a blast doing it. And we hope our fellow players had just as much fun playing it. So far, two out of three Two Point games have been fully localized into Turkish. For any future entries in the series, we’re ready to dive in again with the same dedication—and the same goal: making it feel like the game was written in Turkish from the beginning.
One final word of advice: keep a close eye on your museums. You never know when the mummies might wake up, ghosts might flood the halls, or long-extinct dinosaurs might come back to life. But don’t worry… all of it will happen in Turkish!
