• Light/Dark
  • Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.

Did Nintendo refuse to be a synonym of video game?

Tetrinski

Tetrinski

Banned
May 17, 2018
2,915
So I was at a retro game store the other day and got to chat with the owner for a bit. This was in western Canada. I'm from Europe so we were comparing the industry and its history between regions.

I was getting some OG Xbox games (Panzer Dragoon Orta!) and mentioned that those games were very hard to find in my country, Spain, because Xbox was almost as unpopular there as in Japan. I mentioned that, specially in the late 90s and early 00s, PlayStation was so popular in Spain that it became a word used as a synonym of videogames, at least home consoles, by many people (I believe it ended with the irruption of the Wii). It never seemed to bother Sony (I mean, why would it? A parent walks into a store to ask for videogames but refers to them as PlayStation, it's obvious what they'll end up buying).

At this point, he mentions that back in the day, in the 80s and 90s, people in North America started to refer to video games as "Nintendos" even if they were talking about Atari products, for example. Apparently, Nintendo didn't like being associated with other companies that way and sent letters to business owners asking them to make sure they avoided confusion with, for example, their marketing and advertising and make sure they differentiated the wider term of videogames and every individual brand.

I found this really interesting but couldn't find anything online so I'm asking the wise and knowledgeable users of Resetera, is this true? Does anyone have a good link? I'd love to see one of those letters!
 
Pyro

Pyro

God help us the mods are making weekend threads
Member
Jul 30, 2018
14,505
United States
As far as the word Nintendo being used by parents/grandparents/older people to refer to video games in the 80s/90s, yes that's true.

This is the first I've heard of Nintendo having tried to combat it though.
 
Htown

Htown

Member
Oct 25, 2017
11,318
7TOizRZHU07fJTiN1JdhryI6rXfov9oORnLmHR-12d0.jpg
 
SinCityAssassin

SinCityAssassin

Member
Oct 25, 2017
15,171
I don't recall reading anything about sending businesses those sort of guidelines, but I do remember seeing a 1990s internal note exactly about this premise. Like the post above put.
 
Max|Payne

Max|Payne

Member
Oct 27, 2017
8,953
Portugal
This makes me wonder if the people at Google were ecstatic the moment "googling" became an official word for searching things on the internet, as I don't recall them trying to prevent that from happening.
 
Pokemaniac

Pokemaniac

Member
Oct 25, 2017
4,944
Companies actually don't like when stuff like this happens because they can lose their trademarks if they become too generically used.
 
Wereroku

Wereroku

Member
Oct 27, 2017
6,204
It was probably a smart move. You can lose your trademark if it becomes a common phrase like that.
 
Calamari41

Calamari41

Member
Oct 25, 2017
7,097
If your name becomes synonymous with a type of product, there's a risk that it loses its trademark value and becomes genericized. It then can lose its protection, and Sony can come in and call their system a Nintendo too. Theoretically.
 
Satonaka

Satonaka

Member
Oct 29, 2017
327
Madrid
I'm also from Spain, and Nintendo is (and has been, specially in the DS era) a synonim among non-gaming people for handheld system.
 
GDGF

GDGF

Member
Oct 26, 2017
6,305
If they don't do that they could lose ownership of their own name and anyone could release a product called a "Nintendo".
 
Syriel

Syriel

Banned
Dec 13, 2017
11,088
Tetrinski said:
I found this really interesting but couldn't find anything online so I'm asking the wise and knowledgeable users of Resetera, is this true? Does anyone have a good link? I'd love to see one of those letters!
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

This is a result of US trademark law. If Nintendo did not protect it and let it go generic, it would have lost it.
 
SPRidley

SPRidley

Member
Oct 25, 2017
8,232
Before the playstation people also called videogame consoles in spain in general "la nintendo". Then it changed into "la play" as you said. Now people are usually more informed, even older people, and just call it la consola or the actual name of the console.
Less informed people still use la gameboy or la nintendo for portables though, funnily enough lol

But yeah, reading this thread it seemss nintendo wanted to avoid that in america. Never knew about that.
 
delete12345

delete12345

One Winged Slayer
Member
Nov 17, 2017
19,673
Boston, MA
kubev said:
Wow. That's quite the smug request.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Definitely needed, because at the time, the company that created Hush Puppies was about to close down.

As 1994 eased into 1995, Wolverine – the company that makes the Hush Puppies shoes – was thinking of phasing out the brand. The once-iconic shoes were selling a measly 30,000 pairs a year, mostly in little Mom & Pop stores in the backwoods. And then, just as it seemed that the brand was on the cusp of being consigned to the history books, something happened that changed its fortunes drastically. Hush Puppies was gentrified.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

The ad was released in 1990. A lot of companies suffered brand gentrifications back then.
 
thenadamgoes

thenadamgoes

Member
Nov 17, 2017
105
This is actually really common for any company where the name becomes the product they are making. Like bandaid, Kleenex, Xerox etc. They go to great lengths to make sure they don't let Bandages, Tissue, and Copy machines be called by their brand name. Because they can lose their trademark.

There are several examples of this: Asprin, Trampoline, escalator, Thermos, Videotape. These were all once a brand name like Nintendo, but lost their trademark.
 
BDS

BDS

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
13,845
Trademark protection is a common thing in the US. I remember Lego used to have an alternate website domain where if you typed www.legos.com it would bring you to a splash page lecturing you about how the correct plural form is "Lego® System bricks" or whatever and force you to click through before accessing the site. It was hilarious.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.