The Name of the Game: Select a Character
(or a Story About Video Game Character Names in the ’80s and ’90s)
In the early 1980s and through the mid-1990s some of the most successful video game franchises were overwhelmingly named after the title character. From Pac-Man to Pokémon, video game companies sought to develop “mascot characters” who were at times cute, quirky, funny, cool, lovable, goofy, and even a little obnoxious. These mascot characters were frequently seen as the faces of not just the individual games or the video game consoles they were played on, but the video game brands who brought them to life — for example Mario for Nintendo, Sonic the Hedgehog for Sega, and later Crash Bandicoot for Sony. There are many reasons why these companies chose the mascot route — familiar archetype, personification of the player as the character within the game, workshopped competitive product — and we’ll take a look at a few of them in this article.
Let’s take a quick look at the numbers. In terms of units sold, four of the top 10 best-selling game franchises of all time feature a title character in the name of the game. When it comes to revenue (which includes earnings from licensing), four of the top 10 highest-earning games also include a reference to the title characters from the game.
The paths that game developers took to arrive at the names for these multi billion-dollar franchises are varied and tend to be less direct than one might think. We’ll look at how they came to be and the methods used to brand video game characters in this era of video game history.
The story of early video game character naming is sometimes the story of translations between, and combinations of, Japanese and English. Pac-Man, one of the earliest and most widely distributed arcade video games in America, actually derives its name from the Japanese onomatopoeia for the sound that is made while chewing — “paku-paku.” Pakkuman’s name started as the descriptive “Eating-Man” or “Chewing-Man.” This makes sense — he’s a little orb that eats stuff. However, it was decided early on that this name wouldn’t fly in America, and the marketing team decided to call the character Puck Man because of his similar appearance to a hockey puck. At A Hundred Monkeys we deal with translation and cultural sensitivity issues a lot when naming products, and it’s often most important to think about the environment where a name will most often live. When Namco, the company that developed Pac-Man, realized that their arcades would mostly exist in bars and other public spaces they became fearful that the “Puck Man” logo could easily be vandalized into “Fuck Man.” So Pac-Man was born out of a Japanese-English portmanteau, that was eventually mutated for fear of vandalism. Namco went on to create some amazing multilingual naming architecture for the Pac-Man franchise, including multiple names and nicknames for all of the ghosts, but that’s for another time….
Some fictional icons have multiple myths and chapters of lore surrounding their invention — Donkey Kong is one of those. Until the invention of the Internet, I was told over and over again that Donkey Kong was a mistranslation of “Monkey Kong” — this is patently false, and we’ll get to that.
An interesting point about Donkey Kong’s invention is that Nintendo was actually eager to pursue licensing of the Popeye comic strip and make a game based on it, but couldn’t afford the license. Donkey Kong, Jumpman, and Lady — as they are named in the original Donkey Kong arcade game — are explicit analogs for Bluto, Popeye, and Olive Oyl.
Shigeru Miyamoto, the game’s inventor, wanted to find a metaphorical, but clear descriptor to mirror Bluto’s stubborn, slovenly, and brutish nature, that descriptor became “donkey” because he thought that it would successfully translate to the American audience. So Miyamoto created his “stubborn ape” with “Donkey Kong” — the second word in the name successfully brought to mind a monkey, but later led to a huge trademark lawsuit with Universal Studios over infringement on King Kong. Eventually, Nintendo would win that battle and keep their barrel-hucking franchise character in business.
Which eponymous video game star has sold more cartridges than any other? It’s-a him, Mario! This portly, Italian-American plumber is a story of Nintendo pursuing a more interesting and specific characterization of a protagonist from a separate title. Mario’s creator, (again) Shigeru Miyamoto, originally wanted to call the character Mr. Video, but that didn’t last through launch. Mario first appears in the original Donkey Kong arcade game, but his name is listed only as “Jumpman” in the game’s English instructions, and he is referred to as Mario only in the sales brochure. As Nintendo worked to develop the character of Mario, inspiration for his name came from an interesting place: Mario Segale, Nintendo of America’s warehouse landlord at the time. While Donkey Kong was being launched in the U.S., Segale confronted Nintendo’s president over unpaid rent. The story goes that after a heated argument, Nintendo reassured Segale that he would be paid and decided to name the character after him — whether it was appeasement or part of a negotiation is a little unclear. Miyamoto later doubled down on the importance of creating a name and personality for Mario, commenting that “if he had named Mario ‘Mr. Video,’ Mario likely would have ‘disappeared off the face of the Earth.’” Lesson here? Something too broad, or too descriptive may not work for a lasting character name — it’s unlikely that the world would have fallen in love with a character named Jumpman or Mr. Video…and it’s best to pay your rent on time if you want to avoid arguments with your landlord.
Sonic the Hedgehog was brought to life by creator Naoto Ohshima by way of an informal poll of random passersby at Central Park in New York City. In 1990, Ohshima surveyed strangers with several internal designs of characters developed at Sega, in order to create a protagonist and cast of characters intended to compete with Mario and the other Nintendo characters. After asking a number of people for their opinions, it became clear that “the spiky teal hedgehog” was the favorite. At A Hundred Monkeys we’re not always big fans of testing, but it’s fair to say that Sega arrived at a likable design for their mascot character by way of this old-school form of crowdsourcing — they were aiming for “something that could be easily drawn by children and be familiar, as well as exhibit a ‘cool’ attitude,” and they more or less got it. Sega wisely codenamed the character “Mr. Needlemouse” as opposed to something more likely to sound like a go-to-market name — this is an effective strategy when you don’t want developers to fall in love with an early name before a project is close to launch. Once they established the hedgehog’s primary ability as traveling at supersonic speeds across various terrains, they arrived at the somewhat evocative “Sonic.” Name over.
Pikachu is the primary mascot for the broader Pokémon universe, even though it’s not one of the preliminary three characters you start with in the original game. The character is so ubiquitous that even if you don’t know its name, you have probably seen its likeness splashed all over shopping malls and the internet — it’s even reasonable that you could think that its character name is “Pokémon” for that matter. Pokémon and Pikachu live at the intersection of an interesting era in video game development and franchising, when video game mascots and cute characters began to give way to first-person shooters, nameless protagonists, multiple character options, and avatar customization — but that’s also a different story for a different time. Pikachu is the result of carefully crafting naming and imagery. In Japanese, “pika” is the sound of an electric spark, and “chu” is the sound a mouse makes so its name is an onomatopoetic portmanteau of two Japanese words. Developers Game Freak and Nintendo knew that Pikachu would be the focal point of the brand and put a lot of effort into the character, with creator Junichi Masuda noting “Pikachu’s name as one of the most difficult to create, due to an effort to make it appealing to both Japanese and American audiences.” More than $50 billion later, it seems they got their mascot and brand right. It should also be noted that not all of the Pokémon have such adorable or even pleasant names, and wouldn’t have worked as the mascot— for example, I’m not sure that Vulpix, Weepinbell, Dewgong, or Lickitung* could have carried the full weight of the Pokémon brand.
* These are all real names of Pokémon from the original 150 that were created.
Crash Bandicoot is the last of this early generation of video game mascots to come to market. For that reason, and because his development came out of the need for an established corporation (Sony) with an expansive existing product offering to compete in a new market against competitors that had only been upstarts when they (somewhat haphazardly) developed their mascot characters, things went a little differently. Crash’s developer, Naughty Dog, openly acknowledged that they wanted to mimic what Sega had done with Sonic and “incorporate an animal that was ‘cute, real, and no one really knew about’.” The development team actually purchased a field guide on Tasmanian mammals, settling on the wombat and the bandicoot as final options. Creators Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin started using “Willie the Wombat” as a temporary, internal name but it was “never meant to be final, due both to the name sounding ‘too dorky’ and to the existence of a non-video game property of the same name.”
Press pause: It’s interesting to note that Naughty Dog’s mimicry of Sonic the Hedgehog went as far as to use Crash Bandicoot’s canonical species as his surname and have his primary action (destroying boxes) work as his first name — this did go along with their self-aware, even slightly sarcastic, characterization of their protagonist who was known to be quirky and enthusiastic, but a little empty-headed.
As the character became fully-fleshed out and the launch of the franchise was imminent, there were two problems: 1. the usage of the internal name “Willie the Wombat” (and some similar derivatives) had made some decision makers too comfortable with that character name, even though the final decision hadn’t been made to implement it, and 2. Naughty Dog and the marketing director of the game’s publisher, Universal Interactive Studios, were indeed at odds as to which name would be taken to launch. Universal wanted the character to be Wez, Wezzy, or Wuzzle the Wombat, or Ozzie the Otzel, while Naughty Dog was fighting for Crash Bandicoot. Ultimately, the latter name prevailed when Naughty Dog threatened to abandon development of the game over the impasse. And that, kids, is how corporate compromises about naming shouldn’t be made — at the threat of dissolving the project. In some cases, A Hundred Monkeys has been brought in early in development to specifically help develop codenames that could go to market and to help achieve team alignment on naming philosophy, and thereby avoid stalemates like this.
These video game mascot naming stories offer a variety of templates of how product naming can go well or poorly. Whether they are examples of happy coincidence, frustrating struggles, or careful planning they all offer a lesson or two about the steps and missteps that one can make in developing a product and naming it successfully. Down the line, I’ll focus on other elements of video game naming and architecture, and even let you in on an A Hundred Monkeys experience with naming a major video game protagonist. In the meantime, happy gaming and drop us a line if you need some help naming your next pixel-based hero.
“The Name of the Game” is a serialized, first-person look at the world of video game naming by Liam Humble of A Hundred Monkeys.
