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The Origins of Video Game Names
Blogger Drew Mackie has posted a lengthy analysis of the etymology of dozens of names from popular video game characters. It examines the real-life and mythological roots of names from Final Fantasy, Zelda, Mario Bros., Street Fighter, and many other prominent franchises, complete with citations where appropriate. Quoting:
"It's speculated that Street Fighter's Russian wrestler Zangief takes his name from a real-life Russian wrestler, Victor Zangiev. More interesting to me is that the working name for this character was Vodka Gobalsky. This is notable for two reasons — for one, that this name is amazing [and] deserves to enter into the public consciousness and, for another, that it bears a striking resemblance to the name of a Russian boxer in Nintendo's Punch-Out!! series, Vodka Drunkenski. I'm sure this says something about Japanese perception of Russian people. The latter Vodka, by the way, goes by the name Soda Popinski in US translations of the game, presumably because Nintendo of America didn't allow references to booze."
Fear my mighty first post!
8==C=O=C=K=S=L=A=P==D~~ this fp for the gnaa, muthafuckers
I speculate that Nintendo was named after Chintendo, a well known Chinese manufacturer.
The blogger writes in the style of the Onion or Cracked. Clearly this is not to be taken seriously.
this says something about Japanese perception of Russian people
I think it says that they're much in line with the rest of the world on that one.
Is it just me, or do some people have a whole lot of time on their hands?
professional gaming?
twittering?
blogging?
arguing over who gets to love whom?
discussing how the US president swats a fly?
Now, discussing the name origins of characters that appear in video games??!?
Don't we have a some real problems to address, like, oh, we're going to run out of easily available water and energy, and the environment is going to change so much that about a billion people will lose their home over the next 15 years?
I don't get it.
Was Mobius Escher.
...they left out the origin of the "Jack" character in Jack Attack.
(I appear to be showing my age here... Hold on, there's some pesky kids out front...)
Big! Strong! Wow! Tada-O!
AKA Russia Armisky.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
But my GOD. TLDR, much? And half of it is either pointless speculation, or stuff like "I don't actually KNOW the origin of..." Must be a slow news day in IT.
No portion of this post may be rebroadcast without the express, written consent of Major League Baseball.
FTA:
"His last name seems likes a clear reference to King Kong, but the Donkey part doesn't. Contrary to many other urban legends that say otherwise, Donkey Kong earned his first name as a result of Miyamoto wanting to call the villain something that conveyed a sense of stubbornness and stupidity, though he later found out that the English-speaking world doesn't interpret the word donkey in this way."
Wrong. Of course we do. From the OED:
donkey
1. a. A familiar name for the ass.
2. a. A stupid or silly person.
Why do you think Gordon Ramsay keeps using the word to describe the chefs who work under him? He didn't just pull it out of his ass.
Working in Japanese to English game localization, I'm often assigned the task of coming up with English names for characters. Usually this is just a transliteration, but in some cases a completely new name is required. The publisher makes the final call, and I've had to fight hard sometimes to get names that just won't work in English changed. Japanese developers often go to great lengths to research meaningful names for their characters, but not understanding how differently names can be interpreted in other languages, they can get attached to some really ridiculous ones. The only way I could deter one developer from using "Milla" for the name of a huge, ugly dragon boss was by telling them that most players would associate the name with a supermodel...
Don't forget the names that truly boggle the mind. What about clever, obscure titles like "Madden NFL 09"?
http://geography.about.com/library/weekly/aa021400a.htm
Anyone familiar with Japanese history would understand Japanese poking constant fun of the Russians, their neighbors. Russia is a bit of a sore spot to Japan since they are still disputing sovereignty of mineral rich islands that Russia claimed as a results of Japan losing WWII. It doesn't help that Japanese culture has been known as being a bit on the racist and xenophobic side.
Zangief takes "Vodka Gobalsky" and does a spinning piledriver.
Fry: "Wait a second. I know that monkey! His name is 'Donkey'."
Professor: "Monkeys aren't donkeys. Quit messing with my head!"
That was one long article. Am I the only one who stopped reading midway despite all the interesting stories?
Racism and Nationalism are often confused. Not as much as say, Nationalism and Patriotism.
Stereotyping is a byproduct of brains pattern recognition skills; it is not all bad, merely our nature and a fundamentally important one.
An island of clones would differentiate somehow and create some sort of class / status system eventually leading to multiple systems that are not aligned which promote conflict (leaving out explanations of the unknown forming religions which would complicate such an experiment.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
The article says that Dhalsim comes from Kerala (a state that's a narrow strip in the southwestern corner of the Indian peninsula), and that his name is a Malayalam word. That's strange, because I'm Malayalee and I'm pretty sure that "Dhalsim" is not a Malayalam word. Hmm...
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
Did you ever notice that Don Flamenco (Mike Tyson's Punch Out) and Vega (Street Fighter) are both incredibly vain? Perhaps this reflects another Japanese cultural bias?
Anyone know what Starcraft means? Galactic warfare? Space-land-for-battle? It kinda reminds me of Chevy Starcraft, too...
Who gave me the idea that his name was Soda Popinski? I hope I didn't own the Special Edition of Mike Tyson's Punchout! Can anyone confirm this?
without prejudice
Halloween Harry has a jetpack, so does Duke Nukem. Harry prefers a flamethrower. Most would say Nukem prefers either the Glock or Ripper Chaingun though. I've always wondered why nothing ever features the Russian Sega shotgun and slugs (great international anti-piracy tool).
without prejudice
When I first heard of "The Legend of Zelda," the first thing I thought of was Zelda Fitzgerald, mostly because there are so few women I've ever heard of who were named Zelda. I assumed that was just a coincidence. It's very nice to discover that it wasn't: "The game's creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, has said that he took the character's name from Zelda Fitzgerald. "[Zelda Fitzgerald] was a famous and beautiful woman from all accounts, and I liked the sound of her name. So I took the liberty of using her name for the very first Zelda title."
Zelda was famous, yes, and beautiful yes, and for a while the Fitzgeralds were a "glamorous" and lionized couple. She also had a stormy marriage with F. Scot Fitzgerald, and was the fictionalized subject of some of his novels and stories. Zelda was famous for her unconventional behavior, and I've never been able to read between the lines to understand for sure just what this behavior consisted of; was jumping into a fountain in New York just youthful high spirits, or was there more to it than that? Every account talks of her "flirting" with men other than Fitzgerald, and famously saying that she wanted to "kiss" a thousand men; was it just flirting and just kissing? Some of what made her interesting was perhaps the prelude to her mental illness.
By all accounts, they were a sad, tragic, and unlucky couple.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I stopped reading at his very first suggestion that "Zelda" comes from "dhelta" (Gk. for "delta") katakanized into Japanese. The problem is that the delta symbol in Japanese is "deruta," which a quick wikipediaing reveals. First, you go to the English delta, then click the Japanese link on the left to get to deruta.
And I have no idea why Nintendo chose to switch his name from Gannon, as itâ(TM)s stated in the first game, to Ganon in Zelda II: Adventure of Link, and then to Ganondorf in Link to the Past onwards. It seems that now Ganon â" one âoeNâ â" refers to his more hulking, monster form and Ganondorf to his human form.
Actually, that last bit was true from the very first game in which Ganondorf was his name. In A Link to the Past, a character calls his something like "Ganondorf, the Master of Thieves - no, Ganon, the King of Darkness".
Property is theft.
TLDR which doesn't happen that often for me,the last TLDR i had was a pdf of federal law
FYI, it's "TL;DR"
The article doesn't have a possible origin for Guile's name (of Street Fighter 2 fame), but it may be this:
Firstly, Guile in English means cunning, deceit or trickery. Secondly, Guile is clearly an American service man and in the history of Japan, American service personnel did not play the role of the charming visitor (although the country was rebuilt by the Americans, service personnel have a high incidence of rape, murder, and drunken disorderly behavior in the areas near their bases).
The Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, and again in WWII... yeah, I could see the two countries having some bad blood left.
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