Green, Hairy Balls of Death

So maybe you played Secret of Mana back in the day, and maybe its wonderful mishmash of cultures taught you a thing or two. For instance, when you learned that the fifteenth-century scientist and occultist Paracelsus assigned supernatural spirits to the four natural elements — gnomes for earth, undines for water, sylphs for air and salamanders for fire — you recognized the names, and you realized that while alchemy may no longer be a legitimate field of study, its more fantastical tenets live on in nerd culture. Sure, some of the Secret of Mana simply sprung from the developers’ imaginations, but a lot of it came from somewhere, and that was reason enough to wonder about the stuff you never figured out.

Like Aegagropilon, a borderline unpronounceable boss that looks like this:

via

It’s… a giant, lumbering, toothed plant-thing. And it was a pain to beat, I remember, but what lingered most about this boss was the fact that its name seemed like it must mean something.

It does.

via

Best known by their Japanese name, marimo, spherical, velvety balls of green algae can form under certain conditions that are only naturally met in lakes in Scotland, Austria, Japan and Estonia. From Wikipedia:

The round shape of the marimo is maintained by gentle wave action that occasionally turns it. The balls are green all the way round which guarantees that they can photosynthesize no matter which side is turned upwards. Inside, the ball is also green and packed with dormant chloroplasts which become active in a matter of hours if the ball breaks apart. The wave action also cleans the balls of detritus. As some colonies have two or even three layers of marimo balls, wave action is needed to tumble them around so each ball reaches the light.

The Japanese name comes from a combination of the word mari, “ball,” and mo, a generic term for water plants, according to Wikipedia. The Ainu call them torasampe, “lake goblin” and tokarip, “lake roller.” In Iceland, they’re kúluskítur — from kúla, “ball,” and skítur, “skítur.” But their scientific name is Aegagropila linnaei, and knowing that, it’s pretty clear that someone involved in the production of Secret of Mana knew this fact, saw that the Aegagropilon was a green, round plant thing and was all “Hey, how about this for a name?” And now, nearly twenty years after I played the game, I see what they did there.

Aegagropila, by the way, is apparently Greek for “goat hair.” Logical conclusion: Goats must be different in Greece.

Berserk for Etymology

I’d like to think that I’ve made the point here that video games, if experienced by a mind destined for dorkery, can teach you a thing or two. Just today, I realized that I’d learned one thing without realizing it.

If there’s one thing you could say sets Final Fantasy V apart from the entries in the series that directly proceed and follow it, that thing would probably be the fact that it wasn’t translated for English-speaking audiences until years after it hit shelves in Japan. If there were a second thing, it would probably be the fact that it features this weird homoerotic subplot in which two male leads seem to have crushes on a third male character, a pirate. That tension only gets resolved when the pirate reveals himself to be female, at which point the lusty feelings are never mentioned again. And that is a little unusual, if you think about it, for a video game.

But if there were a third thing, and your conversation partner hasn’t left the table because they don’t give a shit about Final Fantasy, it would be that the player is given a great deal of control over his or her heroes. With the mere change of a costume, their role in the game shifts. Princess Lenna, the main heroine? She can be your bruiser if you elect to have her play the part of the night. Butz, the hero? (Yes, Butz.) He can be a sissy healer and wave a magic health wand over everyone else. In that sense, it’s quite egalitarian.

The classes your little people can claim are largely based on stock types that had existed in the Final Fantasy series for years, but one class was new in Final Fantasy V: the Berserker. This type of character provides an interesting challenge. Though they’re ferocious in a fight and can take and receive damage like a pro, the player has no control over them. See, they’re berserk. They call their own shots, so they’re basically like an enemy character who just happens to be on your side.

They also wear animal skins — adorably pixelated little animal skins. See?

This is all information I learned back in high school, when Final Fantasy V received its first official English translation. Years later, that job title Berserker was rattling around in my head when I decided to look it up and find out exactly what it means to go berserk.

The goods, via Etymonline: Though the term Berseker was introduced to English by Sir Walter Scott, it comes from an Old Norse word berserkr, meaning “raging warrior of superhuman strength.” And while the history of that word isn’t precisely known, it’s presumed that it comes from the root ber, “bear,” and serkr, “shirt.” Bearshirt — or someone wearing a bear’s skin as clothes.

Thus, ol’ Final Fantasy V and later sequels weren’t too off the mark when the clothed their big-headed berserkers in animal skins.

And that is neat.

Hunger, Games

(Disclaimer: This post is not about Hunger Games in any way.)

Perhaps you are both a video game enthusiast and also a general smartypants. I mean, wow, your social calendar must be just exploding, but we’re not here to trade insults. Let’s just say you feel equally comfortable with a joystick or a copy of The Book of Lists in your hand, and when you’re not shuffling pixels around a screen you’re chasing down some new point of trivia that will just make you the envy of your message board cohorts.

If that’s the case, you might know that Pac-Man was, in his earliest incarnations, known as Puck-Man, and that his name was only changed because a vandal armed with a magic marker could have easily blacked out the edge of that “P” and rendered the game pornographic. A lot of you doubly nerdy types know that one. But why Puck-Man, especially given that he’s not all that hockey puck-like? The name comes from this Japanese word, paku paku, which describes the sound (kinda) but also the action (kinda) of chomping — literally “eating in big mouthfuls,” according to this collection of the Japanese quasi-onomatopoeia. (Basically, these words cover the sound effects we use but also name phenomenon that don’t actually make noise, like glimmering light or an intense stare. Also, they’re adverbs. It’s weird.) And paku paku is a sensible word to inspire Pac-Man’s name because eating is all he does. Hell, eating is all he is, given that the most basic representation of him is just a moving mouth.

Keeping that in mind, Mr. Game-Playing Smartypants, consider this: In Japan, the name of the bitey, chompy, pipe-dwelling carnivorous weeds that you find in Super Mario Bros. is Pakkun Flower. The name totally comes from the same mouth-flapping Japanese word. And, now that you think about it, you have to admit: Both being video game characters that you’ve known more or less your entire life, they have a lot in common, Pac-Man and the Piranha Plant.

And that common thing is eating, constantly eating, even eating when there’s nothing to be eaten, but still biting, always biting, biting the air, eating the air, always eating. And if you’re that lame-o who exists at the precise cross-section of video game dork and trivia-scouting word nerd, this fact will seem neat and novel and totally noteworthy.

French Cuisine, Via Japan, Via a Video Game

Here is a villain.

I mean, just try to imagine any instance where this guy is not a villain. Go head. Try.

He may not mean much to you, this Waluigi-looking dastard, but he’s the big bad of an eight-bit video game called Panic Restaurant, wherein the ingredients and instruments of an industrial kitchen turn evil in the way that things in video game universes inexplicably do. WHen I played the game, the guy’s name was Ohdove, and I always wondered why someone thought that was a serviceable name for an evil chef. Now I know. According to the Wikipedia page for Panic Restaurant — I was feeling bored and nostalgic, okay? — the guy’s name is supposed to be Hors D’Oeuvre, but the process of taking a French word, rendering it in Japanese and then translating it into English made that completely unrecognizable. Now I know.

A small thing, I’ll admit, but I never get tired of finding out that clunky or meaningless-seeming names from old video games were, in fact, supposed to mean something, and that translation and re-translation obscures meaning but also makes something new.

And that may be the most profound thing I will ever write about Panic Restaurant.

Names and games, previously:

• Who put the P in the P-Wing?
• Aloysius Minch and Geldegarde Monotoli from Earthbound
• Firebrand? Or Red Arremer?
• The strangest nations of the world, as depicted in Super Mario Land
• The reason there are those weird equals signs in the names of the Golden Axe characters

Aloysius I Am Not

It’s been forever since I’ve had anything to add to the “names and games” file, much less any sort of update to the “It’s a Secret to Everyone” post. But seeing as how that one posts still draws more traffic than anything else on this blog combined, I suppose this is worth posting. Earthbound-ignorant, keep on moving.

So beloved childhood game Earthbound boasts all kids of wackiness. It’s just a quirky, offbeat title whose strange asides often go unexplained. However, I found that one brave soul is tackling the game bit-by-bit, looking at how the finalized, English Earthbound developed from the original Japanese version, Mother 2. It’s a pretty massive undertaking, considering the among of text in the game, and I have to hand it to anyone who so loves a video game that they’re willing to examine it in such detail — and in two languages, no less.

In particular, translations notes about some of the characters’ names offers a little insight into what was running through the mind of the guy who originally created them. Take Mr. Monotoli, the tycoon ruler of Fourside, the game’s New York City-like area.

He’s probably the most famous of the Earthbound bit players, since one of the Earthbound-inspired Smash Bros. stages takes place on to of the Monotoli Buildling, one of the skyscrapers he owns. Given that Mr. Monotoli is an old guy with a lot of cash to spare — and given that the game constantly namechecks American-born pop-culture — I’d always assumed the guy’s name was a play on the word monopoly or maybe Mr. Monopoly himself. Also, the writer of the Earthbound games, Shigesato Itoi, is a weirdly big Monopoly enthusiast as well as president of the Japan Monopoly Association (whose conventions, I’m sure, are nuts). According to the translation tracker, it’s probably just a coincidence. In Japanese, the guy’s name is Monomotchi Monotori, with the first name meaning something like “guy who owns lots of stuff” and the second one meaning “guy who takes stuff.” Basically, a robber baron. The guy doing the translation couldn’t make any more out of the character’s weird first name, Geldegarde, than I could.

Then there are the Minches, a family of mostly unpleasant people and the source of the game’s big bad, Porky.

In the Japanese, Porky’s last name is minchi, which means “mincemeat” and even looks like a borrowing of the English “mince,” rendered in Japanese. There’s also a bit more for Aloysius Minch — Porky’s idiot father and a character whose name I guessed was a play on Atticus Finch, literary superdad. In Japanese, his first name is Anburami, which means “greasy” or “oily.” And the wife is Lardna, so there seems like a definite theme for the family’s first names. Only I can’t figure out how Porky’s little brother — Picky, the only skinny Minch — fits in.

I will never get tired of digging up old stuff from my childhood and finding out that this or that meant more than I realized at the time.

Blocks, Blocks, Blocks, Blocks

Hey, remember Tetris?

It’s, um, the Russian one with the blocks. And it’s relevant today, says me.

tetromino (tet-RAH-mi-noh) — noun: a plane or solid figure constructed by joining together four identical polygons edge-toedge

Though I can remember Nintendo Power back in the day referring to the Tetris blocks as tetrads, the term used by non-video game dorks (though still by dorks, because come on) is apparently tetrominos, and not because Tetris blocks fall from the sky and tetromino happens to sound like something parachuters would yell. The term comes from the combination of the root tetra, meaning “four,” and domino. But in inventing this word, someone made an interesting assumption, whether consciously or not.

Like tetrominos, dominoes are shapes constructed by joining identical polygons — just two of them instead of four.

And it would seem that someone decided to treat -omino as if it meant something on its own, and the initial “d” like it was a contraction of di-, a word that can mean “two.” That’s not the case; domino comes from the Latin word dominus, “lord” or “master,” either because whoever wins gets to claim that title or because the black titles used in the game resembled the domino, a black garment word by certain officials in the eighteenth century. However, domino got reinterpreted and -omino took on meaning on its own. (In that way, it’s a lot like helicopter, which breaks into word parts a lot differently than most people would guess.) Now we have triominos (which have three squares) to dodecominos (which have twelve squares) onto infinitominos (which I just made up, but which theoretically exist). We even have n-ominos to represent every size of polyomino in between. And yes, there’s even a monomino, which is fun to say but is basically just a square and is therefore the most boring of the lot.

So there you go: The next time you’re trying to clear a four-liner and you get a worthless two-by-two when you needed a one-by-four, curse your lousy luck with tetrominos, not tetrads. Or, you know, you could do something more creative with them.

Previous strange and wonderful words:

• acné excoriée des jeunes filles, adulterine, ageusia, ambeer, anosmia
• barrack, bissextile, bloofer, breastsummer
• catholicon, cecaelia, cherpumple, couvade, cranberry morpheme, crwth, culaccino, cummingtonite
• deasil, decussate, deuteragonist, dingle
• eidolon, epeolatry, epopt, espalier, etui
• fabiform, fissilingual, Föhnkrankheit, folderol, froward
• gallinipper, grandgore, grue, guilloche, gyaru
• hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, hogo, honorificabilitudinitatibus
• ignivomous, iracund, isabelline, itaiitai
• jabroni, jamais vu, jehu, jumentous
• kaffir, kakopygian, kayfabe, knipperdollin
• leman, lemniscate, limnovore, linsey-woolsey, longicorn
• malacia, malison, milt, mongo, morepork
• narrenfreiheit, nef, nihilartikel, nobiliary particle, nosism
• ochanee, ogonek, ombré, ooglification, orchidectomy, ordured, orf
• pace, pareidolia, pavonated, perendiate, petrichor, pismire, pogonip, pong, pruniferous, puggle, pulveratricious, purse
• quacksalver, quagga, qualtagh, quidnunc
• ronion, roynish, rubirosa, rumpsprung
• salmagundi, scrutator, seneschal, shebang, sinople, stevedore, suovetaurilia
• tappen, teratogenesis, tergiversate, thagomizer, thon, tiffin, tittery-whoppet, tmesis, toby, tyro
• ucalegon, ultramontane, umquhile
• veneficial, verdigris, vespertilionine, vinegeroon
• weeaboo, williwaw, witzelsucht, wooper looper
• xenodocheionology, xyster
• yazoo, ypsiliform, yoink
• zanjero, zenzizenzizenzic, zinnober, zugzwang

Word nerd? Subscribe to Back of the Cereal Box’s word-related posts by clicking here.

Another Fun Things Italians Have in Common WIth Germans!

I usually assume most crazily specific words come from German. Not the case this week. Tomato sauce, emphatic gestures and the cinematic fusion of noir and slashers have a new friend: Add this word to the list of worthwhile things we’ve gotten from a certain boot-shaped country.

culacino (KOO-la-CHEE-no) — noun: the mark left on a table or other surface by a moist glass

I should probably mention that culacino is one of those that shows up most often in lists of kooky, foreign words but isn’t useful enough to appear in your average basic Italian-to-English dictionary. However, it does show up in Howard Rheingold’s They Have a Word For It — a quaint, non-web-based collection of strange words — so it at least was real enough to get the okay from some copy editor. (Also, God help the person who has to edit a book specifically about obscure, non-English words.) So, I guess I can’t say for sure that it’s real. But come on — do you have a better word for the phenomenon of rings being left on surfaces by moist drinking glasses?

Not boding well for culacino being a real word? I can’t find an etymology for it. And on the blog post where I found out about it, it was spelled cualacino, which might actually be correct, for all I know. But culacino seems to be the term most recognized by Google. So the next time you have guests and someone is rude enough to not use a coaster, tell them “You’ve ruined my coffee table with something that maybe is called a culacino, said various people who didn’t have access to complete Italian-language resources!” And then eject them from your home with whatever amount of force seems necessary.

Previous strange and wonderful words:

• acné excoriée des jeunes filles, adulterine, ageusia, ambeer, anosmia
• barrack, bissextile, bloofer, breastsummer
• catholicon, cecaelia, cherpumple, couvade, cranberry morpheme, crwth, cummingtonite
• deasil, decussate, deuteragonist, dingle
• eidolon, epeolatry, epopt, espalier, etui
• fabiform, fissilingual, Föhnkrankheit, folderol, froward
• gallinipper, grandgore, grue, guilloche, gyaru
• hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, hogo, honorificabilitudinitatibus
• ignivomous, iracund, isabelline, itaiitai
• jabroni, jamais vu, jehu, jumentous
• kaffir, kakopygian, kayfabe, knipperdollin
• leman, lemniscate, limnovore, linsey-woolsey, longicorn
• malacia, malison, milt, mongo, morepork
• narrenfreiheit, nef, nihilartikel, nobiliary particle, nosism
• ochanee, ogonek, ombré, ooglification, orchidectomy, ordured, orf
• pace, pareidolia, pavonated, petrichor, pismire, pogonip, pong, pruniferous, puggle, pulveratricious, purse
• quacksalver, quagga, qualtagh, quidnunc
• ronion, roynish, rubirosa, rumpsprung
• salmagundi, scrutator, seneschal, shebang, sinople, stevedore, suovetaurilia
• tappen, teratogenesis, tergiversate, thagomizer, thon, tiffin, tittery-whoppet, tmesis, toby, tyro
• ucalegon, ultramontane, umquhile
• veneficial, verdigris, vespertilionine, vinegeroon
• weeaboo, williwaw, witzelsucht, wooper looper
• xenodocheionology, xyster
• yazoo, ypsiliform, yoink
• zanjero, zenzizenzizenzic, zinnober, zugzwang

Word nerd? Subscribe to Back of the Cereal Box’s word-related posts by clicking here.

Name That Gargoyle!

Today I’m picking up a subject I’ve left alone for a while: words and video games. My goal is to use the power of the internet to answer a little linguistic mystery that has puzzled me for a while.

A short video game history lesson: Back in the day, Capcom (the people who made Street Fighter) released a side-scrolling arcade game, Ghosts ’n Goblins, which featured a knight hopping through what essentially amounts to a tacky Halloween haunted house landscape. Being a coin-operated game, the head-bashingly difficult Ghosts ’n Goblins aimed to overwhelm the player with countless undead monsters, assuredly killing the knight and forcing the the player to dump quarter after after quarter into the machine in order to progress. Despite that, the game caught on and spawned a lot of sequels and spin-offs, including some that starred the original game’s first-level boss, a nasty red gargoyle. In the spin-offs, you could even play as the gargoyle, jumping around, doing typical gargoyle stuff. As it stands now, the gargoyle may have appeared as a playable character more often that the original knight protagonist has.

He used to look like this:

But advancing video game technology has allowed him to look like this:

Now the wordy part: In the American release of the first gargoyle-centric game, the character was called Firebrand. (Good gargoyle name!) But the character’s original, Japanese name was something that gets rendered in English as Red Arremer. (Confusing!) Now, both Japanese and American games use the latter name. (Feel ways about it!)

And, finally, the confusing part: For the life of me, I can’t figure out what this name means. I could mean nothing, sure, and it could be a Japanese word that just translates like something that looks like an English word. But given that it has the word red in it and the character itself is red, I’m willing to bet that the name is English, translated into Japanese and then reproduced back in English in a way that makes it unrecognizable. Is it some variation on ream? (Parallel thoughts: “Don’t get ruined by the word ream, childhood memories!” but also “Ha ha, ream.”) But the character doesn’t bore any holes or, you know, engage in buttplay, so I think the answer lies elsewhere. I know that translating between English and Japanese can mean the insertion of vowels in between the consonants and that whole fluidity with the letters “L” and “R,” but I can’t switch the letters around in any way that makes more sense in English. Reamle? Lemul? Lemur? Could it be Armor? Nothing. What the hell is Arremer supposed to mean?

So then, internet — language-keen and video game-savvy people who frequent this blog, I’m looking at you — can you make anything from this? There is a theory that the a possible way to find obscure information online is to simply post somewhere what you don’t know and let the answer come to you, and I’m willing to try put this tactic to gargoyle-related use.

In closing, three more word-related thoughts on this game series:

• After Ghosts ’n Goblins came a sequel, Ghouls ’n Ghosts, but the alliteration stopped there, unforch, but I guess forcing the pattern would have resulted in games like Geists ’n Ghastly Things We Didn’t Put in the Last Game, so maybe it’s for the best.
• The series’s Japanese name is Makaimura, which translates to “Demon World Village,” the last word of which sounds not only redundant but also oddly cute to me. Like, “Ooh! Scary place where demons come from! … But look! They’re churning butter!”
• Yeah, the apostrophe looks wrong to me too. It should be Ghosts ’n’ Goblins, since both the “a” and “d” in and got contracted into oblivion.
• Of course, the heroic knight from the original games is chasing after a damsel. Tragically, this game’s leading lady got stuck with the name Princess Prin-Prin, which is just embarrassing.

Don’t Shoot the Hard Hats — Helmet Enemies in Mario and Mega Man

The following post links etymology, translation, and video games — and all in the context of two underappreciated video game grunts.

If you’ve ever played a Mega Man game, you’re familiar with the little baddies that are basically living, walking hard hats. You happen upon them and they initially just look like a stray helmet, perhaps dropped by a forgetful construction worker. “What a helpful item!” you say. “Perhaps I shall take it for my travels!” Then, little eyes poke out from beneath the brim and the creature fires at you. “WHY ARE YOU HURTING ME, HELPFUL HAT FRIEND?!” you cry out. Eventually, the trauma is too great and you must take your Mega Man back to the video rental store. In tears, you ask the clerk for a selection with friendlier hats. (A dramatization... or was it?) In most instances, these pests are invulnerable, as their little helmet bodies reflect any projectiles that you fire at them. However, when their eyes pop up and they fire at you, you have a chance to attack. If you can get a shot in during these few seconds, you can take these guys out.

A visual aid:


Despite its frequent appearances in Mega Man games, the name of this particular pest is debated. To some, it’s Mettool. To others, it’s Metall, Mettall, Metaur or Mettaur. The last of these has risen in popularity in the past few years, but the Mega Man wiki groups all the appearances of these characters under the simpler name Met.

Now hold that thought and consider this: If you happened to have encountered the Mega Man hard hat baddies, then I’m willing to bet that you also tangled with their Mario series equivalent, the nasty, invulnerable baddies known in the U.S. as Buzzy Beetles. As with the Mettaur, projectiles — specifically Mario’s fireballs — don’t faze them. And stomping them only stuns them. In short, they’re hard to deal with in many of the same ways the Mettaurs are.

Another visual aid:


Just today, I learned that the Japanese name for the Mario beetles is Metto, which, like Mettaur and its variants, comes from the English helmet. Though the connection seemed plausible, I wanted to double check. Really, why should the names come from the second syllable of an English word? But indeed, the Japanese seem to have two words for helmet — tetsubou and herumetto, the latter of which is a direct transliteration of the English word helmet into Japanese.

So there you go: these two characters are linked in that their original names reflect their nature and, while both Japanese-sounding, ultimately come from English.

This strangeness makes me re-think my suspicion of a character in the Japanese movie Hausu. All of the girls in this particular horror movie are named to reflect their personalities. The fat one is called Mac — inexplicably so until it’s revealed that the name comes from the English stomach. (She likes to eat, get it?) If Mettaur and Metto can come from a translated and retranslated version of helmet, then maybe the explanation behind fatty Mac’s doesn’t seem so illogical. Nonetheless, interesting to see how an English word can get repurposed in two very different ways, while still spreading awareness about the benefits of hard hats.

Games ‘n’ names, previously:

• Name etymologies in Super Mario Land
• Spell suffixes in Final Fantasy
• Translation changes in Super Mario RPG and Super Mario World
• Beyond Final Fantasy IV: epopt, seneschal and eidolon
• Gay love, Brian Epstein and Tony in Earthbound

Game geek? Subscribe to the video games-only feed for Back of the Cereal Box.

Ax Is Not Equal to Battler: What’s the Deal With the Equals Signs in Golden Axe?

A personal challenge for my geekish tendencies: In this post, I will relate an obscure punctuational phenomenon to video games and a luxury hotel. Go!

So back when I was a kid, a staple of pizza party birthdays was Golden Axe, a swords-and-sorcery beat-em-up released by Sega in 1989. (You know which one I’m talking about, people my age. This is the game where you would beat up little gremlins to get magic potions and where you could ride those weird animals with chicken beaks and whiplike tails. Ah, memories.) As with all arcade games, Golden Axe had an “attract mode” that gave the machine something to do when no one was playing. In addition to the typical “Winners Don’t Use Drugs” card, this particular game’s attract mode flashed pictures of the three playable characters and the big bad.

Visual aids, courtesy of Hardcore Gaming 101:





See those weird equals signs between the characters’ first and last names? (Or, rather, what a Japanese person thought should pass for appropriate, Western-sounding first and last names? Though I must admit that I wish my name were Gilius Thunderhead.) What’s the deal? Well, this message thread — a collection of little-known video game facts that I previously linked to sometime back — points out that the symbols are actually double hyphens, a fairly rare punctuation mark used in the following instances:

• When a nonstylized hyphen simply looks too boring, because you’re fancy like that.
• On a related note, it’s officially a double hyphen that separates the two parts of the name Waldorf=Astoria.
• In Merriam-Webster dictionaries, a word that normally would be hyphenated but that is split between two lines gets a double hyphen in order to demonstrate that the word’s internal punctuation should remain at all times, not just when it spans the end of a line.
• And, finally, in certain contexts, a double hyphen separates first and last names. When writing in katakana characters, an em dash or a regular hyphen normally does this job. However, if this symbol could be mistaken for a prolonged sound mark (ー), the double hyphen does the job. It also sometimes gets to separate multiple foreign names. The example Wikipedia gives for this is the Russel-Einstein Manifesto, which in katakana would look like a bunch of symbols most of you can’t read with what looks like an equals sign in the middle.

So there you go. Though the Japanese usages don’t quite seem to fit the instance seen in Golden Axe, it seems likely that the double hyphens there resulted simply from a designer’s effort to separate first names from last names, Giliuses from Thunderheads. Next time you’re staying at the Waldorf, playing Golden Axe with a bunch of 1990s-era children, or simply struck with the realization that your hyphens look to ordinary, you have options.

A video game-specific follow-up: Those chicken things? With the saddles and the whiptails?


They have a species name, I’ve learned: bizzarians. Or bizarrians, depending on who is typing.

And remember:

… But they do spend all day plunking quarters into a arcade machine slicked over with pizza grease. Thank you, William Sessions.

Who Put the “P” in the P-Wing?

Like many kids, I played Super Mario Bros. 3 until my fingers hurt. During all that time spent in front of a television sent, fingers a-twiddling, I had an opportunity to think. One of the things that has bugged me about that game is a very special item called the P-Wing that allowed Mario to fly over a given stage, avoiding injury and the certain death that bottomless pits bring. But why was it called P-Wing? What does that “P” stand for?

These are questions that seemed quite pressing to a child. Now, as a 27-year-old, I’ve finally gotten the answer. (Though I kind of forgot I was looking for this answer for roughly seventeen years. So there’s that.) Wii.com has a regular feature called Iwata Asks, in which Nintendo president Satoru Iwata talks to the people who develop Nintendo games and has them walk him through the history of a given franchise or staple video game element. It’s basically as close to director’s commentary as video games can get. The release of New Super Mario Bros. Wii last month prompted a discussion on the history of the Mario franchise that yielded some cool tidbits, including that Mario’s creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, initially wanted to call him Mr. Video and that the Goombas — those ambulatory mushrooms, quietly villainous and so easily stomped — are, in fact, shitakes. (That latter bit might be kind of a “no duh” to anyone with eyes and a basic understanding of what mushrooms look like, but the Japanese name for the critter translates more or less to “chestnut people,” leading some to think they were chestnuts with legs. Chestnuts with legs! The insanity of it!)

I might not have even had a look at these interviews had I not seen a tip-off at game blog Destructoid, which noted that the P-Wing was to Super Mario Bros. 3 what a new function called the Super Guide is to New Super Mario Bros. Wii: a means of helping unskilled players clear difficult levels and proceeding with the game. For the former, it allowed them to flit right over the hard parts. For the latter, it allows the computer to play through the level, demonstrating how to clear obstacles.

Destructoid didn’t note it, but the article also answered how the P-Wing, this item for baby players with clumsy little starfish hands got its name. Nintendo veteran Toshihiko Nakago is explaining the physics of flying in Super Mario Bros. 3 — which, by the way, involves a raccoon tail and ears, just like we now use today — and how normally Mario would need to get a good running start before he could take off.

I’m not sure who came up with the name, but we all referred to this as “the runway.” So at that point, we looked again at the maps and completely reworked the levels so that Mario would have places where he could take off from. In the end, we made it so that if you got an item called the P-Wing, which was the Koopa Paratroopa’s wing, you could fly through the whole level.

So there you go. The item — a wing with an otherwise mysterious “P” on it — comes from the Paratroopa enemy, hence the initial. The Koopa Paratroopa — a winged turtle whose name is a pretty obvious pun on paratrooper — has been airborne ever since the original Super Mario Bros., and it’s his wing that makes the P-Wing-powered Mario so ready for flight… even though he’s still flying with raccoon parts.


The funny thing about the “P” behind the P-Wing is that it’s probably a coincidence that this explanation of its name ended up working out sensibly in English. In Japan, the Paratroopa is called Patapata, which comes from the Japanese onomatopoeia for a pattering noise — usually of feet but apparently in this case for the flapping of wings. It just so happens, then, that the Japanese and English names for this thing happen to start with the same letter. The rest of the characters’ Japanese and English names don’t, by the way, and those translating the original game clearly didn’t take initial letters into account when they dreamed up English-friendly names for the characters.

Regardless, that settles that about that “P.” Eight-year-old me would be so satisfied. Current me: slightly less so, I suppose, but happy nonetheless.

So… What, then, does the “P” on the balloon power-up in Super Mario World stand for?

It’s a Secret to Everybody, Part Fifteen: The Worst Names in Video Games

(This is a reposting of just one section of my overlong “It’s a Secret to Everybody” post on video game etymologies. Click the link to see the whole shebang. Links to other sections are at the bottom of this post.)

And, to end this series on names in video games: the most wacked-out video game characters. Many of these I came across in researching the original post, and, often, I couldn’t fathom an explanation for why they exist. I just have to stand in awe of the their bizarre nature.

The Worst Names in Video Games

(with worst meaning poorly thought out, nonsensical,
whacked-out or just plain inappropriate)

Pizza Pasta
Punch Out!!

Some Nintendo staffer’s best effort at creating an Italian-themed boxer for the 1984 arcade installment of the Punch Out!! series: a Sylvester Stallone-looking cretin. Never appeared again. At least he fared better than the series’s representative of Russia, Vodka Drunkenski.

Caffeine Nicotine 
Samurai Shodown

His opponents may draw their names from historical personages and crude Japanese puns, but Caffeine Nicotine takes his fairly obviously from two addictive substances. I couldn’t tell you why, but his creators chose to drive the theme home with the back story that he hails from a temple known as Koka-in, or “Cocaine.” Which is cute. My best guess is that Caffeine Nicotine represents some distortion of the Capuchin Monks, but that wouldn’t take into account the nicotine element — unless you consider the fact that one of this grizzled, knee-high sensei’s attacks involves blowing tobacco smoke in his enemies faces. Bizarre, all around.

Pudding
Dragon Quest II

Enix — a video game-developing company that has since married Squaresoft and created the entity now known as Square Enix — has a series that in its day rivaled Final Fantasy. In the U.S., it was initially called Dragon Warrior, but the longtime Japanese name, Dragon Quest, has now caught on worldwide. Early in the series, the American versions of the game made quite a few adjustments for non-Japanese audiences. Among them: the names of the cast of the second game. The singular heroine, known superficially as Princess of Moonbrooke, gets a proper handle when the player chooses it, and one of these possible default names is Purin. In subsequent appearances, unfortunately, she’s stuck not with Purin but with this Japanese word’s translation into English: Pudding. This is problematic for several reasons. First, while video games have a rich history of naming women after edible, nice-smelling or aesthetically pleasing objects, calling someone Pudding takes it too far. Second, the existence of the Japanese word purin makes it possible that the aforementioned female characters I tried to associate with the Jewish holiday Purim may actually be associated with pudding. And thirdly, Purin happens to be the Japanese name of the Pokémon character Jigglypuff. And that just sucks.

Devilotte de Satan III
Cyberbots: Fullmetal Madness

And then sometimes the pendulum swings too far in the other direction. Devilotte de Satan III — who’s sometimes known as Devilot and whose middle name, really, should be Subtlety — is a maniacal princess who appears as a playable character in the mech fighter Cyberbots and again in the Capcom crossover title Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo. As her name suggests, she’s pure evil — over-the-top evil, in fact. Well, at least her name’s not Pudding.

Marth
 Fire Emblem

Had Nintendo never taken the Fire Emblem series outside Japan, poor Prince Marth might not be on this list. But they did, and they shoved Marth into Smash Bros. Melee, exposing non-Japanese players to the franchise for the first time. For some inscrutable reason, the translators chose to interpret the Japanese name Marusu as Marth instead of Mars, even though the latter sounds a hundred times cooler and had already been used as the character’s English name in a dubbed version of a Fire Emblem anime. No luck for the video game version of the character. He became not Mars, but Marth — as in some back-formed masculine version of Martha. Doesn’t Nintendo realize that guys who wear headbands need the most masculine names they can get?

Wander
 Shadow of the Colossus

The hero’s names don’t go all femme-y only in the U.S., however. For English-speakers, Sony’s awesome adventure title Shadow of the Colossus centers on a man named Wander who darts across beautiful landscapes Legend of Zelda-style and then fights various towering monsters. In Japan, however, both the game and hero’s names are different: It’s Wanda and the Colossus and the heroic monster-fighter is Wanda, at least in how the Japanese characters representing this name would be translated. (It should be noted that commenter Josef points out that the Japanese release of the game includes English text that clearly states Wander, not Wanda.) A hero being named Wanda, even if only in specific contexts, amuses me. I guess that’s what you get for naming your character after a verb.

Rungo Iron
Toshinden

If a name like Devilotte de Satan III qualifies as less than subtle, consider that it takes at least one small mental leap to move from Devil and Satan to evil. With Rungo Iron — often represented even more obviously as Run-go Iron — there’s even less distance between the name and the thing the name refers to: “run,” “go,” and “iron.” The references are appropriate in that the stone club-wielding fighter is less like his blade-toting opponents than he is a freight train, hitting fast and hard. To make matters worse, Rungo is the sole American combatant in the original Toshinden — the Guile, in more ways than one — and none of the other characters throughout the entire series are nearly as dumbly named. I’m not sure whether this says more about video game developers or their attitudes toward Americans.

Tiny Kong
 Donkey Kong Country

In the beginning, Tiny Kong’s name made sense. After the first three Donkey Kong Country games, Rare saw fit to dispense with a lot of Donkey Kong’s hangers-on and replace them with new ones. The substitute for Dixie Kong was a character introduced as her kid sister: the beanie-wearing Tiny Kong, who had the magic power of being able to shrink down to a minuscule size — for fun and adventure! As time passed, Dixie proved more popular than Tiny, but Nintendo brought Tiny back years later… and did so in a way that made her name doubly irrelevant. She no longer could shrink, for one, and she now stands a head taller than her former big sister, for another. Tiny grew up in other ways, too: She also happened to now be a lanky, tube top-wearing teen whose form suggested an attempt at sexiness that simply should not be. Despite this anthropomorphic unpleasantness, Tiny Kong persists. Ew, Nintendo. Ew.

Exdeath
Final Fantasy V

I suppose you can’t expect much from an anthropomorphic tree — and Exdeath is just that, a tree so possessed by evil that it gained sentience, took a vaguely human form and attempted to conquer the world — but for a character who serves as Final Fantasy V’s big bad, his name sucks. Exdeath. What is that? The official spelling is at least better than what’s offered in the fan-translated version of the game, released before the real deal hit U.S. shores: X-Death. Literally, it could be taken to mean “out of death,” but that doesn’t even make sense, especially considering that “out of tree” would have been more appropriate. Even worse: Many have posited that his name should have actually been Exodus, which still doesn’t work all that well but at least could be taken to refer to his trek out of the forest and into to the realm of villainy. Really, I don’t blame Exdeath for having a bad temperament. In addition to coping with the realization at some point that he, despite sentience, was only a tree, he has a stupid name. And life is rough for those with stupid names.

Tiaramisu
Wario: Master of Disguise

For reasons I’ll never understand, the universe of the Wario games is oddly more populated with female characters than is that of the Mario games, from which the Wario ones spun off. Consequently, Wario has faced off against a lot of female big bads. Among these is Tiaramisu, a character who initially appears in the form of a tubby, masked woman in a red dress and who ultimately reveals her true form as a evil, bloated Princess Peach clone. Furthermore, as a big bad, she’s known as Terrormisu, which stretches the pun in the original name far enough to break it. Tiramisu is a thing. Tiaramisu is an attempt to make tiramisu more “princessy.” Terrormisu is just stupid. Other characters introduced in Wario: Master of Disguise — and likely to never be seen again, given the game’s unpopularity — include chaps named Carpaccio and Cannoli, so clearly Nintendo had Italian food on the brain when making this game. But the theme falls by the wayside with this one, who just has a little much going on in her name. Sometimes puns just go too far.

Trevor Pearlharbor
Killer7

I’ll admit right now that I’ve never actually played the Capcom-produced, multiple personality-themed shooter Killer7. I’ll also say that I’m not an excessively politically correct person. However, the fact that a character with the last named Pearlhabor exists in a video game does stretch the limits of good taste. If anyone can provide any elucidation as to why his name should not be considered inappropriate, I’d be happy to hear it.

Princess Yoyo
 Bahamut Lagoon

She’s not just the heroine of a Squaresoft-developed Super Nintendo game that never made it out of Japan, she’s also another great example of what can go wrong with the trend of naming female characters after objects. Perhaps it’s best that Bahamut Lagoon never officially made it out of Japan, where the word yoyo can refer to the toy but can also just mean “idiot.”

Ax Battler
Golden Axe

Where to begin? Ax Battler is one of the three playable characters in Sega’s sword-slinging beat-’em-up Golden Axe, the other two being Red Sonja rip-off Tyris Flare and feisty dwarf Gillius Thunderhead, the latter of which himself has a pretty terrific name. Upon hearing the name Ax Battler, you might think the name is actually a description of the character. It’s not. You might also think he’d be the one of the three characters who fights with an axe — if not the very axe referenced in the game’s title. Nope again. Mr. Battler carries a sword; it’s Mr. Thunderhead who carries the axe. Finally, there’s the strangeness in the fact that the game officially spells the character’s name Ax — that is, without the “E” at the end. Now ax is an acceptable spelling of the word more commonly represented as axe, but the fact that both would feature in the game so prominently is just stupid. Matters got even worse when a later spin-off that focused specifically on Ax awkwardly included both spellings in the same title: Ax Battler: A Legend of Golden Axe. Fortunately, this title is now remembered as little more than a rip-off of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, even down to the structure of the title. Sequels Golden Axe: Revenge of Death Adder and Golden Axe III replace Ax with clones with equally awkward names: Stern Blade and Kain Grinder, respectively.

Yoko Harmageddon
Street Fighter Alpha 3

An extremely minor character appearing only in certain scenes involving a marginally less minor character, included here only because the name Yoko Harmegeddon needs to be recorded for the ages. Yoko is the frowsy manager and trainer of R. Mika, an impossibly buxom, blonde-haired Japanese woman and professional wrestler who appears as a playable character in Street Fighter Alpha 3 and who looks like a cross between Baby Spice and Bubbles from Powerpuff Girls. As far as I know, Yoko only appears in R. Mika’s win poses and does so riding a golf cart. Amazing.

Geese Howard
Fatal Fury

Most write-ups of Fatal Fury big bad Geese Howard note that he has an ill-fittingly comical name considering the extent of villainy. He’s like James Bond villain evil, to the point that most of the crime that drives the plotlines of the early Fatal Fury games — and in one existence, bad goings-on in the sister series, Art of Fighting as well — can be traced back to him. I haven’t got a clue why his name is Geese, however, or even why it would be the plural instead of the singular. The matter is further complicated by the existence of another Fatal Fury character, a lunatic in raver pants named Duck King. Drugs can account for that name; I can only surmise that Geese is a mistranslation of something, though I’m at a loss for what. The name irks me to the point that I’m actually focusing on it for this concluding list of bad, inexplicable names rather than that of another Fatal Fury fighter: a guy named Marco Rodriguez in the Japanese release but changed for English-speaking territories to be Khushnood Butt — literally cush, nude and butt — for literally no good reason that I can think off. A good result of Geese’s odd name is that it makes for accidentally funny related merchandise. For example, one of his theme songs is titled “Geese ni Kissu,” or, in English, “A Kiss for Geese.” And a manga centered on the character bears the title Geese in the Dark, which is misleading if you aren’t familiar with Fatal Fury.

King
Art of Fighting

The short version: Despite what you might expect, King is a girl. The long version: If SNK’s Fatal Fury games are that company’s attempt at an answer to Capcom’s Street Fighter, then SNK’s Art of Fighting games are another attempt at an answer, if maybe you didn’t like the first one. The first Art of Fighting game features only one female character: a kickboxing bouncer named King. The character is initially depicted as fairly butch but has gradually been feminized in later appearances to the point that no one would mistake her for a man at this point. And that just makes her name more of a head-scratcher. She has never been given a last name, as far as I know, and I’m fairly certain she shouldn’t have been born with the name King. (This anonymous commenter points out that drag kings might have some bearing on the character, her name and her style of dress.) To confuse matter more, one of her motives behind entering fighting competitions is to win enough money to pay for an operation for her younger brother, who, in keeping with what could be a family tradition of bucking gender traditions, is named Jan.

Pretty much everyone in Saturday Night Slam Masters

A nearly forgotten Capcom fighter known as Muscle Bomber in Japan, Saturday Night Slam Masters and its cast has mostly fallen by the wayside. Save for Mike Haggar from Final Fight, none of the characters have appeared in other Capcom fighters. And that’s a shame, really, because if quality were determined by the strangeness of their names, then these guys would be regulars. Often, the Japanese names are loonier. Take, for instance, the character known in the U.S. as Alexander the Grater — that’s right: Grater and not Greater. In Japan, he’s Sheep the Royal. The guy the English version of the game calls King Rasta Mon is known in Japan as Missing IQ Gomes. That’s not to say that some of the American appellations aren’t uniformly better. The series protagonist, known in Japan as Aleksey Zalazof got saddled with the name Biff Slamkovich in the U.S. Similarly, the rotund Kimala the Bouncer was renamed Jumbo the Flapjack, which is evocative, if nothing else.

And that’s it. I honestly never would have expected that this article would have grown to such an unwieldy length, but it did — and now I can say that it represents literally everything I can think of to say about words in video games. I’m sure there’s stuff I’m missing, and I fully expect the kind of people who will read this thing through to tell me what significant bits I missed. Please do. I hope that, other than proving that this much can be written on the subject of video games and etymology, I’ve demonstrated that video games are just as wired into every other facet of culture as any other medium. They may not be held in as high regard as literature or film or music, but they draw on the same sources, even though you might not expect them to do so.

The whole “It’s a Secret to Everybody” series:

• Part One: Legend of Zelda
• Part Two: Mario, Donkey Kong and Wario
• Part Three: Sonic the Hedgehog
• Part Four: Street Fighter and other Capcom titles
  
• Part Five: Final Fantasy
  
• Part Six: Final Fantasy IV and Dante’s Inferno
  
• Part Seven: Metroid and Kid Icarus
  
• Part Eight: Castlevania
  
• Part Nine: Earthbound/Mother
  
• Part Ten: Chrono Trigger
  
• Part Eleven: Secret of Mana/Seiken Densetsu
  
• Part Twelve: Mega Man
  
• Part Thirteen: Miscellaneous Nintendo titles (Kirby, Pikmin, Pokemon, Animal Crossing, Duck Hunt, Clu Clu Land)
  
• Part Fourteen: Odds and Ends (Guilty Gear, Ogre Battle, Samurai Shodown, Pac-Man, Mappy, Adventure Island)
  
• And the entire original post