Doctor Robotnik or Doctor Eggman?

Doctor Who?

Today we all need to take a moment and reflect upon the 30th birthday of everyone’s favorite anthropomorphic hedgehog — and no I’m not referring to Sonichu. I’m talking about Sonic the Hedgehog! My first Sonic related memory was actually an argument I had with my older cousin while I was playing Sonic Advance on my GBA as a child. He insisted that the mad scientist antagonist of the game was named Doctor Robotnik. Robotnik? My game clearly said his name was Doctor Eggman.

As there was no way to fact-check back in the day, playground arguments and unsubstantiated rumors usually stayed right there on the asphalt. However, we are now in the age of the internet, and frankly, I want to get to the bottom of this.

Why the Discrepancy?

According to Wikipedia, Doctor Eggman’s name is actually a reference to the Beatles song “I Am the Walrus,” specifically the line “I am the eggman, they are the eggmen.” However, when checking Wikipedia’s source, the GamesRadar article that it links to says:

In Japan, Robotnik has always been known as Dr. Eggman, perhaps as a punny reference to the classic The Beatles pop song “I Am The Walrus.”

The keyword being “perhaps,” so there is no definitive proof contrary to what Wikipedia implies. Reddit user /u/Lunarnarwhal also provided further speculation in the form on this meme that was posted on the /r/beatles subreddit

DeviantArt user gogyou-faia-bara even created this piece of fan art based on this theory back in 2006.

Russ Frushtick repeated this Beatles rumor in his article about the Robotnik/Eggman mystery. However, he provides no sources, and it is likely that he simply pulled the information from Wikipedia. On the other hand, his article does provide a useful quote from an interview with Takashi Iizuka, the creator of Sonic.

“When the game was originally developed in Japan, they called the character Eggman,” he [Iizuka] told Game Informer. “That was the name of the character, but when the game got localized and ported into the Sonic the Hedgehog that we know in the West, they decided to, without confirming with the development team, change his name to Ivo Robotnik or just Robotnik. That’s kind of when everyone first learned about the character. Of course, this was without consulting the people who made the game. They just kind of went off and did it.”

This explains why, when the original Sonic the Hedgehog was released in 1991, the Japanese instruction booklet called him Doctor Eggman and the American version called him Doctor Robotnik. Frushtick’s piece further explains how the 1999 game Sonic Adventure tried to bridge this gap by calling him both Robotnik and Eggman and led me to a 2008 interview with Yuji Naka, one of Sonic’s creators. He had this to say on the issue:

Robotnik is his real name and Eggman is a common name taken after his shape. Possibly, it may have been Sonic, who uttered this alias for the first time! I feel, though, Sonic uses this name affectionately, rather than trying to make fun of him.

So there you have it. His name was originally Eggman, but the localization team decided to call him Robotnik in America without consulting the original dev team. Therefore, efforts were made to bridge this gap by having his official name be Doctor Robotnik and nickname be Eggman.

So I guess my cousin and I were both right. That ends that…or does it?

The Mystery Remains

The mystery surrounding the origin of Doctor “Eggman” Robotnik’s name still persists, however, as there seems to be no evidence backing up the theory regarding the Beatles song. If I were to make a guess, I would go with Occam’s Razor: they named him Eggman because his body is shaped like an egg. After all, Naka himself said in his interview that “Eggman is a common name taken after his shape.”

Weirdly enough, Jim Carrey who played Doctor “Eggman” Robotnik in the Sonic the Hedgehog movie actually sang a cover of “I am the Walrus” in the 1990s. As YouTube commenters noted:

“The prophecy has came true, Jim Carrey is the Eggman.”

“He’s just been casted in the Sonic movie as Robotnick. Now he truly is the Eggman”