Pac-Man, Tetris, Halo—these are just some of the odd names of video games that are now so widely used that we rarely questions where those names came from.
See the stories behind how these games, and a slew of others, got their now-famous names ... and what they were almost called instead.
Pac-Man was inspired by a Japanese onomatopoeia.
It’s not easy to create a game based solely on the concept of eating. But Namco employee Tōru Iwatani did just that in 1980 by taking the idea of a pizza with a slice missing, and then having it eat a bunch of dots while being chased by ghosts in a maze. (Iwatani has also said that the shape is a rounded version of the square Japanese character for “mouth.”)
The name of the game, Pakkuman, was inspired by the Japanese onomatopoeia, “paku-paku,” which describes the sound of eating, similar to the English word “chomp.” As the game was brought to market, the title morphed into Puck Man.
But when Puck Man made his way to North America there was concern that the arcade cabinets would be vandalized by making the P into an F to spell something entirely different. A compromise was reached and the game became known as Pac-Man instead. Thanks to the American marketing machine, the name Pac-Man was eventually adopted for the game all over the world.
Metroid comes from 'metro' and 'android.'
The name of Nintendo’s classic game is actually a combination of two words: metro, as in another word for subway, which is an allusion to the game’s underground setting; and android, referring to the game’s protagonist, Samus Aran, who appears to be a robot through most of the game. (Really old spoiler alert: Samus is a woman.)
Game designer Alexey Pajitnov named Tetris after a geometric shape and his favorite sport.
When Russian game designer Alexey Pajitnov named his famously addictive video game, he decided to combine two words: tetromino and tennis. A tetromino is a geometric shape comprising four squares. Tennis was just Pajitnov’s favorite sport.
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