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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."
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.
Which is a shame considering the seriousness of the topic.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
You're posting on slashdot.
...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!
professional gaming
twittering
blogging
arguing over who gets to love whom
discussing how the US president swats a fly
That reads a lot like the "extracurricular activities" section of resumes of recent college grads that pass over my desk at work these days.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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...
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.
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?
Please hand in your geek card immediately.
See, this is what serious geeks do. They think about stuff. Lots of stuff, and they think about it a lot. Some of it is trivial, some of it is important, and a surprising amount of it appears to be trivial and turns out the be very important later. They don't decide whether they'll think about something based on its importance; they decide based on whether it's interesting to them at the moment.
The exact same people who worry about things like the etymology of the names of video game characters are the people who come up with solutions to serious environmental, economic, and technical problems. And the people who whine, "Why are you wasting your time on X when Y is so much more important?!?" ... are the people who will never put enough serious, obsessive thought into anything to make any serious, long-lasting impact of any kind.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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
What does that even mean? They are all less formal than a scientific paper, but there is pretty much zero resemblance otherwise.
Anyone know what Starcraft means? Galactic warfare? Space-land-for-battle? It kinda reminds me of Chevy Starcraft, too...
It's because the game is essentially Warcraft in space.
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!