Wait! Fear not! I am not going to bore you with a literature piece but I’m about to discuss about naming relating to video games.

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Rather than delving into the deceptively hard process of naming a video game, I’m more interested in knowing how you call your console/video game. Well, I don’t mean to say that you converse with your console or game, which is actually okay if you do, but what I really mean is how you call consoles/video games when they're mentioned in a conversation. What piqued my interest concerning this curious nomenclature case has to do with what I recently experienced.

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A friend of mine would always mention his favorite childhood console as "Atari" and as hard as I tried, I could never know which Atari he was actually talking about. He couldn’t identify any of the Atari consoles in pictures that I would show him, nor could he find his childhood console in a retro video game shop we visited. I tried to explain that maybe he was mistaken about the console name but being as obstinate as always, he maintained what he said. He would further add that his favorite game was Aladdin and went on talking about how he lost his copy. So I dismissed this story as another one of his numerous elaborate fiction...

Later, another friend who’s from the same country as my “Atari-friend” came over for a visit and was looking into retro video games. When I showed her Super Mario Bros. she started talking about how she would be playing this for hours on on her Atari. Yes. That’s what she said. Atari. Well, unless any Atari could emulate the NES, there was something terribly wrong here...

​

After an inquisition with those two “Atari" owners, I figured that what they owned in their childhood was actually an NES, or more likely a clone since my friend broke several of his. And, for some obscure reason, they would all call it as an Atari. But I was not so surprised. In fact, I could relate! Back in my childhood, we had similar clones which we would call Family Game and that was the term we would use when talking about consoles/video games until we got old enough to differentiate Nintendo from Sega. Others would even generalize everything as a Nintendo.

​

I don’t know if you can relate to a similar story but I would be very much interested to hear about it if you do! So how did/do you call your consoles/video games, or anything else really, other than by its original name? There’s no convention for that and that’s what makes it all the more interesting!

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"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."

You might have come across the above quote while adventuring into one of your literature class but it’s somewhat relevant here. No matter how you call consoles/video games, they are what they are. Giving them nicknames shows our affection to the medium, how much it matters to us. They never cease to amaze us.

 

[Prans]

@Pacheko17 it's a pity to hear about the view people have about Nintendo in your area, maybe you should recommend them GBAtemp and experience the love the company gets here from this community!

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@NikolaMiljevic the bootleg NES in my childhood would be ready to play as soon as you plug them to the TV. Some were even just controllers! I remember that sometimes later there would be ones that had the same form factor as the N64 controller!

 

[Fatih120]

Back when I was 4/5, I had a Game Boy, and it was the pokemon yellow edition. It had pokemon and a Wario game and whatnot, but iirc I still managed to call it a Game Boy even though I found some things hard to read in pokemon. [Don't let me tell you about the time when I put pikachu in the PC and desperately tried to get him out even though i couldnt read the words on the PC]

Now, when I had a Genesis with Sonic 2, I just called the whole thing Sonic (after when I learned how to say it), despite having a few other games for it.

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

I've never referred to any of my consoles/games/handhelds by anything other than their actual names (or abbreviations), even when I was young. Most of my friends are gamers themselves, so I don't really experience it when I'm out and about with them, and my girlfriend is also a light gamer so nothing weird there either.

As for family stuff, my dad plays video games all the time, so he never had troubles differentiating between consoles and games. My mom does refer to everything as just "games" but other than that nothing weird, occasionally she'll even get console names right. I have two brothers, who are both gamers, and my sister who also dabbles in games enough to know console names and game names. I guess I've just been lucky lol, I've never really had frustrating experiences with that kind of thing.

 

[Prans]

I've never referred to any of my consoles/games/handhelds by anything other than their actual names (or abbreviations), even when I was young. Most of my friends are gamers themselves, so I don't really experience it when I'm out and about with them, and my girlfriend is also a light gamer so nothing weird there either.

As for family stuff, my dad plays video games all the time, so he never had troubles differentiating between consoles and games. My mom does refer to everything as just "games" but other than that nothing weird, occasionally she'll even get console names right. I have two brothers, who are both gamers, and my sister who also dabbles in games enough to know console names and game names. I guess I've just been lucky lol, I've never really had frustrating experiences with that kind of thing.

You're a born gamer! You definitely have it in your blood

 

[Z-WolF]

Uff, where do i start?
I'm from Chile, and if you ask around we're the worst offenders when it comes to rape the language, any language, specially ours. Even other spanish speakers don't understand us. We're the gungan of America (America not 'muricah, is a continent, deal with it). y la wea fome aksjaksjkajskajsk

but seems pretty straightforward for Latin America from what i've reading, here in the 80's everything was an Atari, in the 90's everything was a Nintendo, then appeared the plei-estei-chón* (PlayStation) and people knew the difference mostly because one was cartridge-based and the other was disc-based, but still, for parents everywhere, NES bootlegs/clones with "9.999 games in 1!" was a Nintendo, and once i had a friend's mom explaining me the difference between a clone/bootleg and NES was "one was a consola (console, obviously) and the other was a nintendoh", i took that advice like a religion correcting anyone heathen enough to not know the difference, yeah, i was the soul of all parties.

Sega and other brands never really took off here, maybe the drincas (Dreamcast) because "it had better graphics", but after the president of Sega died they killed it themselves.

Following, we have the plei-doh (Play2), plei-treh (Play3), plei-cuatro (Play4).

Every iteration of the XBOX is nonexistent, there is only the ecsboss.

In the Nintendo side of things, as i said, it started with the El/La Nintendoh** (NES), then the El Súper (SNES), La Sesenticuatro (N64), La Geimkiú (GCN), La güii (WII) and La güiu(WIIU).

In handhelds we have the great and powerful Tetrih (Tetris) where nobody involved in selling it knows how to spell it, i've seen shops with Tetrí and Tetrix. And obviously Tetrih was interchangeable with geimboi (GB) even recently people over 30 (i'm 29) ask me about my 3DS "is dat a new geimboi?" but is not as common as the 90's-early 2000s.

By the look on your face (yep, i can see you) you must be wondering "But a Tetris is a game, a software, how can it be confused with a Handheld?", well, it can be confused when the first handhelds sold where these:

But then the copyright laws weren't as enforced as today so instead of "Brick Game" they had "Tetris" and only came with 8 games and also in every single one of them the first game at boot in the screen was "Tetris" in big, bold, black, brick letters.
And obviously having one was a social status icon, importing wasn't a thing back then so they cost as much as a original Game Boy and the one in the image was an advanced one, because it had 9999 games and SOUND, yep IT. HAD. SOUND. I mean the third little button on the upper row to the right, in the form of relaxing chiptunes!. And don't even let me start on the ones that spoke... In spanish... "INTENTALO DE NUEVO!!!" (try again) with new batteries, full volume, haunts me on my nightmares to this day.
Then the Free Trade Treaty with china was established and the market was flooded with these at low cost, you could even collect them in all their variety of colors and prints, "gotta catch em' all" got nothing on them.

Lastly on the topic of JPN/USA/EUR games, i've had lenghty, passionate discussions with friends who call themselves connoisseurs, trying to convince them that Winning Eleven and Pro Evolution Soccer (PES, big thing here) are the same game. Every year.

I'm curious about how it sounded when you wanted to call your friends over for a round of SSB... "Hey, let's Smash after class?" Sounds cool... or nasty?

Actually, using the name of something as a verb is not a thing around here, Googlear (Googling it) is relatively new and is the only example i can think of that is used commonly outside my line of work (IT).
We just put the "play" (Jugar) or "let's play" (Juguemos) on it: "jugemoh smash", "vamoh a jugar plei", etc...

* In spanish, and i'm over-simplifying, the acute accent [áéíóú] over the vocals mark the difference between po-ta-to, po-táh-to and po-ta-tóh.
** Like the French, we don't have a neutral pronoun like 'it', everything is male (El) or female (La).

And as always, sorri four mai inglish.

 

[Lycan911]

Uff, where do i start?
I'm from Chile, and if you ask around we're the worst offenders when it comes to rape the language, any language, specially ours. Even other spanish speakers don't understand us. We're the gungan of America (America not 'muricah, is a continent, deal with it). y la wea fome aksjaksjkajskajsk

but seems pretty straightforward for Latin America from what i've reading, here in the 80's everything was an Atari, in the 90's everything was a Nintendo, then appeared the plei-estei-chón* (PlayStation) and people knew the difference mostly because one was cartridge-based and the other was disc-based, but still, for parents everywhere, NES bootlegs/clones with "9.999 games in 1!" was a Nintendo, and once i had a friend's mom explaining me the difference between a clone/bootleg and NES was "one was a consola (console, obviously) and the other was a nintendoh", i took that advice like a religion correcting anyone heathen enough to not know the difference, yeah, i was the soul of all parties.

Sega and other brands never really took off here, maybe the drincas (Dreamcast) because "it had better graphics", but after the president of Sega died they killed it themselves.

Following, we have the plei-doh (Play2), plei-treh (Play3), plei-cuatro (Play4).

Every iteration of the XBOX is nonexistent, there is only the ecsboss.

In the Nintendo side of things, as i said, it started with the El/La Nintendoh** (NES), then the El Súper (SNES), La Sesenticuatro (N64), La Geimkiú (GCN), La güii (WII) and La güiu(WIIU).

In handhelds we have the great and powerful Tetrih (Tetris) where nobody involved in selling it knows how to spell it, i've seen shops with Tetrí and Tetrix. And obviously Tetrih was interchangeable with geimboi (GB) even recently people over 30 (i'm 29) ask me about my 3DS "is dat a new geimboi?" but is not as common as the 90's-early 2000s.

By the look on your face (yep, i can see you) you must be wondering "But a Tetris is a game, a software, how can it be confused with a Handheld?", well, it can be confused when the first handhelds sold where these:
View attachment 41568
But then the copyright laws weren't as enforced as today so instead of "Brick Game" they had "Tetris" and only came with 8 games and also in every single one of them the first game at boot in the screen was "Tetris" in big, bold, black, brick letters.
And obviously having one was a social status icon, importing wasn't a thing back then so they cost as much as a original Game Boy and the one in the image was an advanced one, because it had 9999 games and SOUND, yep IT. HAD. SOUND. I mean the third little button on the upper row to the right, in the form of relaxing chiptunes!. And don't even let me start on the ones that spoke... In spanish... "INTENTALO DE NUEVO!!!" (try again) with new batteries, full volume, haunts me on my nightmares to this day.
Then the Free Trade Treaty with china was established and the market was flooded with these at low cost, you could even collect them in all their variety of colors and prints, "gotta catch em' all" got nothing on them.

Lastly on the topic of JPN/USA/EUR games, i've had lenghty, passionate discussions with friends who call themselves connoisseurs, trying to convince them that Winning Eleven and Pro Evolution Soccer (PES, big thing here) are the same game. Every year.



Actually, using the name of something as a verb is not a thing around here, Googlear (Googling it) is relatively new and is the only example i can think of that is used commonly outside my line of work (IT).
We just put the "play" (Jugar) or "let's play" (Juguemos) on it: "jugemoh smash", "vamoh a jugar plei", etc...

* In spanish, and i'm over-simplifying, the acute accent [áéíóú] over the vocals mark the difference between po-ta-to, po-táh-to and po-ta-tóh.
** Like the French, we don't have a neutral pronoun like 'it', everything is male (El) or female (La).

And as always, sorri four mai inglish.

OMG YES! I had like a ten of these, because they would break after two days of use, and we all used to simply call them Tetris even though the real Tetris game wasn't even on it :'D

 

[FAST6191]

I am also familiar with the tetris/brick game. Used to like the various racing games on them.

 

[Prans]

Uff, where do i start?
I'm from Chile, and if you ask around we're the worst offenders when it comes to rape the language, any language, specially ours. Even other spanish speakers don't understand us. We're the gungan of America (America not 'muricah, is a continent, deal with it). y la wea fome aksjaksjkajskajsk

but seems pretty straightforward for Latin America from what i've reading, here in the 80's everything was an Atari, in the 90's everything was a Nintendo, then appeared the plei-estei-chón* (PlayStation) and people knew the difference mostly because one was cartridge-based and the other was disc-based, but still, for parents everywhere, NES bootlegs/clones with "9.999 games in 1!" was a Nintendo, and once i had a friend's mom explaining me the difference between a clone/bootleg and NES was "one was a consola (console, obviously) and the other was a nintendoh", i took that advice like a religion correcting anyone heathen enough to not know the difference, yeah, i was the soul of all parties.

Sega and other brands never really took off here, maybe the drincas (Dreamcast) because "it had better graphics", but after the president of Sega died they killed it themselves.

Following, we have the plei-doh (Play2), plei-treh (Play3), plei-cuatro (Play4).

Every iteration of the XBOX is nonexistent, there is only the ecsboss.

In the Nintendo side of things, as i said, it started with the El/La Nintendoh** (NES), then the El Súper (SNES), La Sesenticuatro (N64), La Geimkiú (GCN), La güii (WII) and La güiu(WIIU).

In handhelds we have the great and powerful Tetrih (Tetris) where nobody involved in selling it knows how to spell it, i've seen shops with Tetrí and Tetrix. And obviously Tetrih was interchangeable with geimboi (GB) even recently people over 30 (i'm 29) ask me about my 3DS "is dat a new geimboi?" but is not as common as the 90's-early 2000s.

By the look on your face (yep, i can see you) you must be wondering "But a Tetris is a game, a software, how can it be confused with a Handheld?", well, it can be confused when the first handhelds sold where these:
View attachment 41568
But then the copyright laws weren't as enforced as today so instead of "Brick Game" they had "Tetris" and only came with 8 games and also in every single one of them the first game at boot in the screen was "Tetris" in big, bold, black, brick letters.
And obviously having one was a social status icon, importing wasn't a thing back then so they cost as much as a original Game Boy and the one in the image was an advanced one, because it had 9999 games and SOUND, yep IT. HAD. SOUND. I mean the third little button on the upper row to the right, in the form of relaxing chiptunes!. And don't even let me start on the ones that spoke... In spanish... "INTENTALO DE NUEVO!!!" (try again) with new batteries, full volume, haunts me on my nightmares to this day.
Then the Free Trade Treaty with china was established and the market was flooded with these at low cost, you could even collect them in all their variety of colors and prints, "gotta catch em' all" got nothing on them.

Lastly on the topic of JPN/USA/EUR games, i've had lenghty, passionate discussions with friends who call themselves connoisseurs, trying to convince them that Winning Eleven and Pro Evolution Soccer (PES, big thing here) are the same game. Every year.



Actually, using the name of something as a verb is not a thing around here, Googlear (Googling it) is relatively new and is the only example i can think of that is used commonly outside my line of work (IT).
We just put the "play" (Jugar) or "let's play" (Juguemos) on it: "jugemoh smash", "vamoh a jugar plei", etc...

* In spanish, and i'm over-simplifying, the acute accent [áéíóú] over the vocals mark the difference between po-ta-to, po-táh-to and po-ta-tóh.
** Like the French, we don't have a neutral pronoun like 'it', everything is male (El) or female (La).

And as always, sorri four mai inglish.

Thanks for your input! Very entertaining read indeed I like how you illustrated the way people would call each console. I wonder if when naming their consoles, companies care about how it sounds/what it means in other languages. For example spelling out "Wii" sounds like "oui" in French, which means yes and also sounds like an enthusiastic English "we".

Oh the Brick Game! That surely brings back memories. I can't recall any of these consoles being labelled as Tetris although my favorite game on the handheld was the Tetris version where you could freely change the Tetrimino shape And we never had the premium version you had. We had to simulate sounds in our heads

As for Winning Eleven, that's the name with which we discovered the "Fifa-killer" of its time. We played it in Japanese, catching some of the commentator's words as well "We will rock you" made it look even more badass!

 

[gkoelho]

Here in Brazil people tend to remember the names, some for nicknames like th playstation family will always be named as play1, play2 etc...

However, when it comes to Xbox's things are messy, cause everyone just call them "box" no matter the version.

 

[FAST6191]

Were it not for the "64" comment earlier I would have said that is a serious penchant for abbreviation.

Wonder if it is related to the clarity in UK/British English thing

 

[darkangel5000]

I think I've never ran into someone who had issues with naming the consoles right and stuff like that.
My siblings were practically born into a tech-savvy family, as my dad was always an early adopter of technology. He picked up a C64, C128D, Atari 2600 and the likes when my siblings were younger, not just for them, but also so he could play games like pitfall, centipede or dig-dug. Later on they bought their own consoles like the Videopac G7000, Gameboys, PSXs etc.
So whilst my parents and siblings are getting older and have mostly lost interest in videogames, they still don't get names wrong.

As for my girlfriend, she also occasionally plays a game or two, so she doesn't mix names up either.
Her mum seems to sometimes struggle with names as 2DS, DS or 3DS - but I think she's just trolling her kids.

My friends... well, I met my best friend on a rather nerdy forum, so my circle of friends is just that: A bunch of videogame lovers.

 

[FranckKnight]

I called my Nintendo DS a 'Gameboy' with my parents for simplicity, because everytime I would say 'DS' I was getting blank stares of 'what the hell are you talking about' followed by 'oh you mean your gameboy'.

Gameboy = handheld, it stopped there for them. So I stopped trying, less of a headache. My mom later owned a NDS of her own, she then got the difference.

There's also oddities with names in certain countries, if I remember correctly. Some regions of China couldn't get Nintendo to do the distribution, so it was being handled by other companies that imported and rebranded them. I would need to find the article, but I think their NES and SNES were branded Panasonic or something like that.

There are other stories of how games took different titles in EU than in USA, for example Dragon Quest games were not numbered in EU for a while, because the first game they received was Dragon Quest 8. Since DQ8 every game has been given a subtitle (The Journey of the Cursed King, the Chapters of the Chosen...) so that's what they were referring every game in EU instead.

The rumor goes that Dark Cloud had a very poor reception in EU, so when Dark Cloud 2 came over, it was renamed Dark Chronicle. I'm not sure the sales were the real reason behind this, but makes you wonder.

 

[Prans]

There's also oddities with names in certain countries, if I remember correctly. Some regions of China couldn't get Nintendo to do the distribution, so it was being handled by other companies that imported and rebranded them. I would need to find the article, but I think their NES and SNES were branded Panasonic or something like that.

Nintendo being branded as Panasonic?! I would like to read that article!

 

[FranckKnight]

Nintendo being branded as Panasonic?! I would like to read that article!

I tried to find something about it, I knew I was off the mark slightly, but I found this on the NES's wikipedia :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Nintendo_Entertainment_System#South_Korea

Apparently the hardware was sold to Hyundai for South Korea. It was called the Cowboy and Super Cowboy.

 

[FAST6191]

Nintendo being branded as Panasonic?! I would like to read that article!

There was the Panasonic Q, a gamecube with a DVD player bundled in.


The Chinese stuff usually went under iQue. I tend to deal more with the technical side of that (do a page search for ique on http://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm ) rather than the business so I do not know much more than it was (the laws relaxed and Nintendo now owns the whole deal) a regulations and kind of tax dodge to allow Nintendo to operate in China when game consoles were iffy there ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25635719 ).

 

[Prans]

Thanks for sharing @FranckKnight

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Ah China, China, you'll never cease to surprise me! No wonder this guy loves you so much!

Thanks for the sources @FAST6191 I didn't know that Chinese DS games wouldn't work on international DSes. Interesting stuff there!

 

[Ev1l0rd]

I as a kid always called the games I played on a handheld a DS game up until we bought a Wii. (That included an old Gameboy my parents had laying around when I was four and all the GBA cartridges for DS backwards compatibility my parents bought for me on Queen's Day (birthday of the queen of our country, a flea market is held throughout the entire country on that day. With the queen having resigned, nowadays it's King's Day, but the gist of it remains the same)).

 

[Prans]

I as a kid always called the games I played on a handheld a DS game up until we bought a Wii. (That included an old Gameboy my parents had laying around when I was four and all the GBA cartridges for DS backwards compatibility my parents bought for me on Queen's Day (birthday of the queen of our country, a flea market is held throughout the entire country on that day. With the queen having resigned, nowadays it's King's Day, but the gist of it remains the same)).

Flea market where you can grab retro stuffs? Looks like your country needs one of my visits!

 

[Ev1l0rd]

Flea market where you can grab retro stuffs? Looks like your country needs one of my visits!

Oh it's not just retro stuffs. People pretty much all sell their garbage (books, old pcs, clothing, toys, old games) that they don't need anymore. Most of it is well... shit, but there are some true gems in there that I still enjoy to this day. A good example of it are "Donald Duck pockets" (~300 pages comic books about the Disney character), most of whom I buy on that day.

 

[FAST6191]

Flea market where you can grab retro stuffs? Looks like your country needs one of my visits!

And with http://www.marktplaats.nl/ being the local ebay equivalent (that is the modern relaunch/version by the way) you can still pretty well as people do not always "just check ebay" and price accordingly.