Quake3World

Breaking down some of the most famous names in the world-wide gaming industry.
by David Smith 06.13.2005

hat, as they say, is in a name? If you ask some major game companies, an awful lot. Those afflicted with a case of nagging insomnia are invited to peruse something like Konami's treatise on the nit-pickety details of its branding image. Who knew that six red letters could mean so much?

In reality, though, the interesting part of a name is the story behind it. Most of the companies that are now powerhouses in the games industry came from relatively humble beginnings, and so their names weren't conceived in a mess of corporate wrangling and focus-group testing. They're puns, or in-references, or funny acronyms. Nintendo's is even a bit philosophical, in a slightly fortune-cookie kind of way. Here, then, are some of the stories behind the names you see on your games.

It's a lot more common for Japanese companies to take an English-derived name than it is to see an American outfit nick a Japanese name. Atari is a particularly odd one, considering that the company was named when the Japanese videogame business was barely a gleam in anybody's eye.

The Atari name was still inspired by a Japanese game, though, if not one you play with a set of silicon chips. Founders Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney picked it from a set of terms involved in the ancient board game of Go. In Go, "atari" refers to a move that threatens a chain of opposing pieces. The equivalent move in western chess would be putting the opponent's king in check.

Bushnell and company initially considered calling the company "Syzygy," pronounced "sih-zih-gee," an astronomical term referring to the conjunction of three celestial bodies, which would coincidentally match neatly with the converging three-stripe logo that eventually came to symbolize the compay. Most would agree that "Atari" rolls more trippingly off the tongue, though -- trippingly enough, anyway, for Infogrames to eventually assume the name as its own, replacing the somewhat French-sounding contraction coined by founders Bruno Bonnell and Christopher Sapet back in 1983.

Old Man River
An interesting example of Japanese companies taking an English name would be Hudson Soft. The Kudo brothers, Yuji and Hiroshi, were of course pretty big on computing and electronics, which led them to start their own ham-radio parts business in 1972 and later become Japan's first PC game publishers. However, they also had another hobby -- trains -- which is where their company's name came from.

Hudson was named after the Hudson variety of steam locomotive, particularly the C62, which ran on the Tokaido and Sanyo lines of the Japanese national railway starting in 1948. The Hudson class itself, in turn, was named after New York's Hudson River, where that type of locomotive first ran in the very late 1920s.

Some companies have similarly personal inspirations behind their names, but they're inspirations of a somewhat less specific sort. Tetsuya Mizuguchi's new publisher Q? Entertainment is apparently a shortening of "Quest for the Future Entertainment," while the name of his development studio, qb, stands for "Quest Beat." Sit and ponder that one for a while...or not. Ubisoft's name is another head-scratcher -- the five Guillemot brothers contracted "Ubiquitous Software" to get their name back in 1986. The company is ubiquitous now, certainly, but it wasn't back then.

A few international loanwords come even further out of left field. The Greek word "eidos" is also well-known to students of ancient philosophy -- it's the original term for Plato's "forms," the intangible, yet immutable representations of the nature of things. One could go on for a while about the irony of Eidos Interactive's appropriation of the word, given how long the company was carried by the exterior flash of an increasingly hollow Tomb Raider franchise, but that would probably get awfully tedious. It's interesting to note that the same root gives us the word "Eidetic," though, which was used for a while by the company now known as Sony Bend, developers of Bubsy 3D and the Syphon Filter series.

Once in a while, you come upon a name that's actually pertinent to the company's business. Midway, for instance, takes its name from the "midways" that used to be featured in traveling carnivals -- perfectly appropriate for an outfit that got started manufacturing coin-operated amusements. The name of its former parent, Bally, also has its roots in the carnivals. It's short for "Ballyhoo," the name of its first early mechanical pinball machine, and carny slang for an act given away in public to draw the marks.

Four Names In One
The founders of Konami, instead of naming the company after their interests, just named it after themselves. Konami got its start back in 1969, when a tinkerer by the name of Kozuki Kagemasa (who's now the company's chairman and CEO) started up a jukebox repair business in Osaka. By 1973, his workshop grew into a full-fledged company embarking in the then-growing arcade business, and he'd picked up some partners. The four founding members strung their surnames together to create "Konami":

# KOzuki Kagemasa
# NAkama Yoshinobu
# Matsuda Hiro
# Ishihara Shokichi

For shortness' sake, Matsuda and Ishihara had to share a syllable in the final product -- "Konamai" doesn't sound quite so snappy as "Konami."

Namco, founded as it was by one man, is named only after him. He had a head start in the amusement business -- Masaya Nakamura's company began manufacturing kiddie rides in 1955, almost two decades before arcade gaming hit it big. In 1972, when it turned towards the arcade business in earnest (it would acquire Atari's Japanese operations two years later), Nakamura Manufacturing became Namco, short for Nakamura Amusement Machine
Manufacturing Company.

Collectors of vintage 8-bit import games probably own a few Famicom or PC-Engine titles branded "Namcot," instead of just "Namco." During the '80s, when Namco entered the console software publishing business in earnest, it created a separate division to handle those releases -- Namco Home EntertainmenT, at least according to some reports, was shortened to Namcot.

Expand, Contract
Capcom, like Konami and Namco both, was a product of the arcade boom in the '70s and early '80s. However, the company wasn't named after its founders or its games, despite the fact that Section Z hero Captain Commando became one of its mascots later on. That would inspire a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. In fact, "Capcom" is a contraction of Capsule Computers, part of the company's original name, Japan Capsule Computers. You can see that name on the packages of some Capcom games dating well forward into its history -- as late as the mid-'80s, for instance, its British subsidiary still went by Japan Capsule Computers U.K.


Sega's name is a similar contraction. While "Sega" initially sounds Japanese to the untrained ear, many game fans know that the company was actually founded by a group of Americans. In 1951 and 1952, a Hawaiian company called Standard Games decided to expand into Japan, marketing coin-op machines -- like mechanical arcade amusements and instant photo kiosks -- to cater to the substantial American military presence in what was then still an occupied nation (Sega was officially established in May of 1952, just one month after the post-World War II occupation nominally concluded). The Japanese branch of the company underwent a slight name change to "Service Games," which was easily shortened to the more Japanese-sounding "Sega."

SNK, beloved of arcade action and fighting fans the world over, settled on a plain set of initials instead of a snappier contraction. Back in its earliest days, it was "Shin Nihon Kikaku," which means "New Japan Project" or "New Japan Planning." The enigmatic Eikichi Kawasaki gave the company its name in 1978, when it was stil a general-purpose software and electronics company, but it didn't take long until he switched to simply trading under those three letters. In part, that might have been a consequence of its early international expansion -- though it didn't rise to prominence until the mid-to-late '80s, SNK established its first American branch all the way back in 1981.

Some contractions and initialisms remain difficult to puzzle out. Korean MMORPG giant NCsoft is curiously cagey about what those first two letters stand for, although the philosophical meanderings in its public corporate profile suggest that it might stand for Next-generation Culture. Ultima creator Richard Garriott offers another interpretation of the name, though -- taking a pot-shot at his former bosses at Electronic Arts, he once said "NCsoft stands for the New Creators of Software Worlds!"

To toss out one more bit of contraction triviata, the name of now-defunct developer-publisher Jaleco is a contraction of Japan Leisure Company. That's a little dry, but it probably beats the name it was temporarily saddled with in its final days -- "Pacific Century Cyber Works Japan."

Leaders of the Old School
Nintendo's name is unusual compared to those of most Japanese game companies. It's an invented word, but it's spelled in the Chinese-derived kanji characters, unlike the katakana syllables that are usually employed for words like that (by Konami, Sony, and most others). Most names spelled in kanji express pretty simple concepts. "Nippon Ichi," for instance, just means "Japan's best," while "Genki" is a common word meaning "vigor" or "energy."

The three characters, , separately mean "duty," "heaven" or "sky," and "temple" or "magnificence." Together, though, "ninten" is a colloquialism meaning something like "trust to the heavens," while "do" is a suffix applied to workshops or other manufacturing businesses. In Japanese, the last syllable of a business' name frequently provides a clue to its purpose -- you often see "ya" at the end of a restaurant's name, for another example. It's a bit of a high-falutin' moniker, but Nintendo is a relic of a much earlier age than most game companies. Fusajiro Yamauchi, grandfather to the famous Hiroshi Yamauchi, first applied the Nintendo name to his playing-card concern in 1933.

Koei is another staunchly traditional company with a staunchly traditional name. Though nowadays Koei spells its name in simple katakana syllables
(), the name was originally conceived as a pair of Japanese characters -- "ko," for "bright," and "ei," for "prosperity." Spelled with a different pair of characters, though, "koei" can also mean "honor" (as in "it's an honor to meet you") or "lonely figure," which makes for an oddly coincidental thematic link to the Nobunaga's Ambition and Dynasty Warriors games, focused as they are on aloof, lone conquerors.

Sadly, Toaplan is best-known to history for that stupid "all your base" gag.
It's not common, but a few Japanese companies combine both Japanese and English in their names. Old-school arcade shooter developer Toaplan mixed the Japanese word for "east Asia," , with the English "planning" to get its eventual name.

This Island Is Square
Some of Nintendo and Koei's younger successors in the software industry were named in a more tongue-in-cheek fashion. Japanese is a language that lends itself to puns of many kinds, especially homophonic gags involving different characters -- RPG powerhouse Square is one example.

Though it's now headquartered smack in the middle of Tokyo's busy Shinjuku business district, Square was founded in 1986 in one of Japan's more out-of-the-way locales, on its smallest island of Shikoku. The company's founders came up with their name as a play on the name of the island. In Japanese, "Shikoku" is spelled with two characters -- , which means "four," and , which can mean "border" in some compound words, although it's usually read as "country." More significantly, when read aloud, it's almost identical to the word for "square" -- "shikaku" -- resulting in an effectively punny name.

Square's new other half, Enix, got started with one of the most boring names imaginable. Upon its 1975 founding, it was called "Eidansha" -- that may sound cool to Japanophilic American ears, but it literally translates to something like "Corporation Company." Lucky, then, that its leaders wised up and developed something clever a few years later. In 1982, when the company was getting ready to enter the gaming business in earnest, it renamed itself with a double-shot of referential humor. "Enix" is a shortening of "phoenix," the mythical bird that rises from its own ashes, and it's also a play on "ENIAC," the name of the world's first digital computer.

ENIAC, for those curious, stands for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer. Working as they were on government contract, its creators were apparently unwilling or unable to come up with something funny.

Lost to History
The meanings behind some names, for whatever reason, are closely-guarded secrets. Bungie Software resolutely refuses to explain its name, although there apparently is an explanation of some sort to be had. "There truly is a very strange reason for the company being called 'Bungie,'" says the developer's official FAQ, "and we daren't reveal it here. There are...penalties leveled at those who reveal the deepest secrets. Penalties that involve bananas and screaming."

Others, of course, have no story begind them at all, or at least no story that's survived long enough to be told. For instance, while you'd think there would have to be a funny story to a name as weird as "Naughty Dog," if there is, Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin have avoided telling it. The official biography of the developer states, "Although it might be appropriate to launch into an entertaining yarn on the origins of the name right about now, we'd just be making it all up. Nobody remembers exactly why."

The company's original name, "Jam Software," has at least a bit of a tale behind it, though. "It was the mid-eighties," they say, and really, that's about all that needs saying.

In 1987, Squaresoft was on the verge of going bankrupt and going the route Data East went not too long ago.

Final Fantasy was given its name because Squaresoft meant for it to be its last game, but... in a fantasic miracle, Final Fantasy ended up getting Squaresoft out of the hole and for that, the name stuck throughout its sequel.