84 History of Slovak Video Games and Their Localization Mária Koscelníková Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Slovakia mkoscelnikova@ukf.sk Abstract Localization of video games is starting to attract attention in the Slovak academic environment. However, there are still some unresearched topics, especially when it comes to the origins of localization in Slovak. In this paper, we aim to investigate the history of Slovak video games and their localization, focusing on the period from the late 1980s to the late 1990s, and to gather the missing information on this issue from a linguistic and pragmatic viewpoint, both quantitatively and qualitatively. 1. Introduction Every year, the number of video games developed in Slovakia 1 is increasing 2 . The earliest available statistics elaborated by the Slovak Game Developers Association (hereinafter referred to as the “SGDA”) show that the number of new games released by Slovak game developers has increased since 2017. Although the data has not been traced diachronically, except for 2017 and 2018, and each new report focuses on different categories of games, we can still observe an increase in developed video games. To track the exact number of released Slovak video games is a demanding and time-consuming process, especially when it comes to the newer games now released in digital form. Thanks to collaboration with Maroš Brojo, General Manager of the SGDA, we now have a list of over a thousand video games released by Slovak game developers. Research on their localization and language support is not a simple task compared to the video games released for older systems, since their testing requires a lot of funding due to the lack of sufficient information on language support, as we constantly point out in our other works (Koscelníková 2020, 2021). We thus decided to first focus on the first decade of Slovak video game development (late 1980s to late 1990s) and trace the origins of localization of Slovak video games from or to Slovak, and other video games localized into Slovak. We will analyse the quality of researched video games based on our model of translation specifics of video games (Koscelníková 2021). Slovak video game developers are constantly contributing to the video games market with interesting and captivating video games. We 1 We use the term “video game” to cover all kinds of video games from computer games through browser games to mobile games. 2 This work was supported by the Scientific Grant Agency VEGA under the project No. 2/0166/19.