| Waluigi |
Game: various Nintendo titles, first appeared in Mario Tennis
Origin
Just like in the first Super Mario Land on the GameBoy, the second game didn't have the classic Bowser as the main antagonist. Instead, Mario would face Wario, a grotesque caricature of himself. Once you beat him, the W on his castle stronghold would flip over, returning to the M of Mario and thus providing a cute little graphical pun. Wario went on to star in his own games and became a staple of the character line-ups in many Nintendo games that followed.
Then along came Mario Tennis and suddenly the need for an ally, like Luigi to Mario, arose. Simply flipping the L upside down wouldn't work, as you'd end up with the same letter or nonsense depending on the used font. But surely finding some variation on "Luigi" wouldn't be too hard, would it?
Why it's lame
Apparently it was too hard as they settled for "Waluigi". That's right, the only thing they could come up with is simply sticking the same prefix to Luigi's name, thus giving us the most cumbersome, senseless name out of a whole number of possibilities. It didn't exactly help either that the character design made him look like the type of guy who hangs around playgrounds with candy in his pockets.
Have I got a surprise for you!
How they can get away with it
In all honesty, the name Waluigi makes a damn sight more sense in the language of origin. The word "warui" means "bad" in Japanese and was used as a play on words for Wario's name. Since warui will sound kind of like "walui" in Japanese (seeing as they don't really have a separate sound for 'l' and 'r'), the jump from Luigi to Waluigi over Waruigi (this is getting tiresome to type) isn't too far-fetched at all. In English, though, all this subtle wordplay frequently used in Japanese media is totally lost. What we're left with is quite simply "Wa-luigi", and that quite simply sucks. Why they didn't bother choosing a different name for releases outside Japan while in other series there's been more name-changing than original content is something best not thought about if you're a fan of logic.
| Solid Snake |
Game: the Metal Gear series
Origin
The codename Snake was based around that of the protagonist of "Escape from New York", Snake Plissken. Where the Solid part comes from is not even clear in his Metal Gear Wiki page, a site entirely devoted to the series.
Why it's lame
There's really only two ways the freudian undertone of the name would escape you, and that's if either you don't speak English or you've been playing the Metal Gear games from such a young age that the name crept into your mind while it was still not devoted to sex for over 30%. Codenames of other characters include Liquid Snake and Solidus Snake, so at least Konami dodged the "Floppy Snake" or "Big Snake" bullets.
How they can get away with it
Having Metal Gear Solid, the game that brought the series into stardom, kicking vast amounts of butt certainly helped. Better yet would have been to make the names refer to the various states of matter, but having Solidus called "Gaseous Snake" instead would've induced far more unintended hilarity. Whether "Plasma Snake" is a cool name or not is open to debate.
| Hiro |
Game: Daikatana
Origin
Pretty much any Japanese production can get away with using the perfectly acceptable name "Hiro". When it's the name of the protagonist of Daikatana, however, and he fights alongside people with such names as "Mikiko Ebihara" and "Superfly Johnson", it only serves the double whammy of being Japanophile AND lame. That, and Daikatana really can't get away with anything whatsoever.
Why it's lame
Calling the hero of the game Hiro isn't great. Giving him the surname "Miyamoto", the same as famous samurai Musashi, is downright laughable considering the first level consists mostly of killing robotic frogs. "Hiro" is a good name for the Saturday Night Fever John Travolta look-a-like in Bust a Groove, it's not a good name for the main character of a dodgy first-person shooter.
How they can get away with it
Before release Daikatana had worked up more hype than creation itself, so only slightly less than Windows 95. When it was finally released and gamers played it only to find out the names were amongst its best aspects (relatively speaking), stuff like "Hiro" and "Superfly" were some of the least worrying turds of the shit pile.
| Rockman |
Game: Rockman. Or, if you wish, Mega Man.
Origin
One of Capcom's best known characters, Mega Man has won the hearts of many with his arm blaster and platforming action. Yet when you mention his name in Japan where the games originate from, most people probably won't have any idea what you're talking about. Because in Japan, he is known as Rockman. He always has been, right from the start.
Why it's lame
In a move so rare that it can only be likened to finding a 1 kilogram diamond lodged in the fossilized skull of a previously unknown species of dinosaur, something actually got better as it got translated from Japanese to English. While "Mega Man" might not be the most inspired of names, you can't deny it's not all that different from, say, Superman or Spiderman. And guess who kids will know better; those two or Jesus. "Rockman", on the other hand, would be a very suitable choice if The Thing from the Fantastic Four would go solo, but how on earth it befits a small robot with a gun arm (that doesn't shoot rocks, to be clear) isn't exactly obvious. His name forms a rather tenuous pun with that of his sister Roll (as in Rock 'n Roll). "Waluigi" may be pretty clever in Japanese, but naming a character just for the sake of making a sibling connection in a way that doesn't reflect any other part of the game is a bit daft to say the least. One can imagine the process involved at Capcom headquarters (circled by a trench filled with sharks, android guards at the doors ...) exactly went like:
Guy 1: "We still need a new name for the robot kid. The programmers liked 'Mighty Kid'."
Guy 2: "What do they know. We run this company. No Mighty Kid."
Guy 1: "Knuckle Kid?"
Guy 2: "That doesn't make sense. Call him" -tries to pronounce Rockman- "Rrlllockuuu man."
Winner: Mega Man.
How they can get away with it
Find someone Japanese and ask them to pronounce "Rockman". You'll notice that it doesn't really matter one iota to them what a character is called, as long as it sounds English and appears to be cool. Besides, if Mega Man's legion of fans is anything to go by, Rockman has so much unnerving fanfiction dedicated to him as well that no-one will stop to think about what nonsense the name really is. At least Capcom had the sense to leave out an extra 'l' in Meg... Rockman's adversary's name, Doctor Wily. The idea that they really intended to naively call him "Doctor Willy" but misspelled it is too delicious to be real.
| Stick Breitling |
Surprisingly, an image search for
"Stick Breitling" yielded mostly
wristwatches
Game: Zombie Revenge
Origin
Zombie Revenge is a spinoff of House of the Dead. Ignore the Wikipedia entry where in the trivia section it says "there are signs throughout the game that prove Zombie Revenge is a spinoff to The House of the Dead", when the first point in the same section states the game was "originally titled Blood Bullet : The House of the Dead Side Story". The only way it's gonna be more obvious is if they planned on called it "Zombie Fighting: House of the Dead spinoff", which is only marginally worse than what they settled on. Then again, who in their right mind is gonna claim "Resident Evil" is a better title than "Biohazard".
The three protagonists of this game provide a cavalcade of awkard naming, with such gems as Stick Breitling, Linda Rotta and Rikiya Busujima.
Why it's lame
While Linda Rotta's name at least somehow inspires a link with zombies, "Stick Breitling" just sounds wrong. Not even in the good old "sounds like a willy" way, but on a far more sinister level. It's the sort of name you'd chuckle at when you hear it's the national sport of some country you didn't even know existed. Poor Stick probably didn't have it too easy in school. So when he gets the chance to blow out his old classmates' brains because they've transformed into hideous zombies, Stick won't hesitate one second.
How they can get away with it
A spinoff of some other arcade game, with the only home release being on a console that died for the sins of us gamers... Never mind that it didn't play too smoothly either, it was never going to be hard to forget about this. It's gonna take a rather select public to get anything other than a puzzled look by mentioning the name "Stick Breitling".
