The video game industry today is widespread and gargantuan, with a player base greater than a quarter of the world’s population. As the medium and its market expanded in the 1980s and 1990s, companies—particularly Japanese companies—developed new business practices to respond to the demands and frontiers of globalization. One particular set of practices involved the alteration and transformation of products to address presumed cultural differences between the site of production and the target consumer market—practices the games industry largely now calls “localization,” identified as a necessary part of the game development process. Articulated as idealized or best business practices, localization techniques seemed to reinforce cultural differences between Japan and their market regions abroad, namely North America and Europe. As I show in this project, however, localization instead produced those differences through the practices’ underlying assumptions, the use of localization logic as a preemptive and post-facto rationale, and the concept’s flexibility and malleability in response to differing social conditions. I track, in chapter order, the varied localization techniques employed in the 1980s and 1990s, the changing social contexts that influenced localization practices and resultant game content, and the impact of corporate social networks in spreading localization ideologies. I ultimately suggest that localization, as a set of discourses, an ideology of globalization, and eventual taken-for-granted cultural “truth” of the industry, mobilized imaginaries of nationalized Others, produced mythologies of essentialized cultural differences, and institutionalized the primacy of such mythologized differences in manipulating the circuitous flows of cultures under globalization.