What Game Localisation Teaches About Renaming a Brand Abroad

A bakery client of ours had spent three years building a name around a word from her grandmother's dialect. When she started wholesaling to a chain across the border, a buyer quietly told her the word meant something closer to "stale" in their region. She called me the same afternoon, convinced she would have to throw away the logo, the packaging and the van wrap.

She did not have to throw any of it away, and the reason I could say that with some confidence is that the games industry has been renaming products for export since the 1980s. Japanese publishers changed titles for Western shelves constantly, sometimes for legal reasons, sometimes for taste, and the ones that handled it well kept everything that made the product recognisable while swapping the single piece that had to go.

Five renames worth studying

These are the cases I go back to when a client is facing a name change. Each one teaches something slightly different.

Biohazard became Resident Evil. Capcom's 1996 survival horror game shipped as Biohazard in Japan. For the American release the name ran into trademark trouble, including a New York band already called Biohazard, so Capcom's US office ran an internal contest and picked Resident Evil. The Japanese series kept its original name for decades. What stayed constant was the mansion, the typewriter save rooms, the Umbrella Corporation logo with its red and white segments. Fans in both markets recognised the same product even though the word on the box differed.

Rockman became Mega Man. Capcom again, 1987. The story goes that an American executive disliked "Rockman" and pushed for something punchier. The famously awful North American box art, a middle aged man in a yellow suit holding a pistol, did more damage than the name change ever could. The lesson I take: a rename rarely sinks a product, but a rename combined with abandoning the visual identity can.

Pocket Monsters became Pokémon. The full Japanese name collided with an existing toy line in the West called Monster in My Pocket. Nintendo shortened the name to the contraction Japanese players already used in conversation. That is my favourite kind of rename, because it was already sitting in the customers' mouths.

Puyo Puyo became Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine. In 1993, Sega reskinned Compile's puzzle game for Western players with Sonic villains and a new title. The game underneath stayed the same, and the Puyo Puyo name returned to Western releases years later with Puyo Puyo Tetris. Swapping the whole identity got the game onto shelves, and it also meant the original brand had to be rebuilt from scratch later.

Gyakuten Saiban became Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. Capcom localised the 2005 DS release with English names that carry puns ("Miles Edgeworth", "Dick Gumshoe") rather than literal translations. The translators treated names as part of the tone, not as labels to be carried over.

What a rename actually changes, and what it should not

Every one of those games was a bundle of recognisable parts. The name was the loudest one, but rarely the one doing the most work. When I photocopy a client's logo to test it, I am checking how much of the recognition survives when the detail is stripped out. Usually what survives is shape, colour and rhythm, not letters.

That gives a useful order of priority when a market forces a change:

1. Keep the mark. If your logo has a symbol, protect it above everything. Resident Evil's Umbrella emblem did more cross-border work than either title.
2. Keep the colour system. Customers recognise a palette from a distance long before they can read type.
3. Keep the typographic voice, even if the letters change. A heavy slab serif stays a heavy slab serif in any language.
4. Change the word, and only the word, if a legal or meaning problem forces it.
5. Look for a rename your customers have already started using, the way Pokémon came from an existing nickname.

The bakery followed that order. We kept her wheat sheaf mark, the deep green and cream palette, and the hand cut lettering style. For the export packaging we used her surname, which already appeared on the back of every box, set in the same lettering. Her original name stayed on everything sold at home. Total cost was a new set of export labels and one afternoon of my time redrawing letters. The van stayed as it was.

The common advice I disagree with

You will often read that a business planning to grow abroad should pick a "global" name from day one, something short, invented and meaningless in every language. I understand the logic, and for venture-funded startups planning to launch in twelve countries at once it may make sense. For a small business it usually produces a forgettable name in exchange for protection against a problem that may never arrive.

The game examples point the other way. Biohazard, Rockman and Gyakuten Saiban were strong, specific names in their home market. They did their job for years before export was even on the table. When the moment came, the publishers changed one layer and carried the rest. A bland name chosen to avoid every possible collision would have weakened the home brand for the sake of a future that, for most of my clients, never comes. I would rather a client pick a name with character and accept that a second version might be needed later.

I will admit the counterargument has weight in one case. If a name is already being searched for heavily in two markets at once, running two names splits that attention. Resident Evil and Biohazard lived with this for years, and Capcom eventually leaned on the English title internationally. That is a cost, just one most small businesses will not face.

Checks before you print anything

When a client is thinking about selling under their name in a new region, I now run through a short routine before anything is redrawn. Search the national trademark register for the target country, not just your own. Ask two native speakers, ideally from different cities, to say the name out loud and tell you the first thing it reminds them of. Check how the name looks in the most common local script if it differs from yours. And put the logo on a photocopier at 25 percent, then show the copy to someone who has never seen your brand, and ask what they remember an hour later.

If you are thinking through the strategic side of a change like this, our piece on why a logo redesign fails when it skips the strategy step covers it in more depth. For more on how game titles carry personality in their lettering, see typography that gives online game titles character, and the rest of our games writing sits in its own section.

A task for this week

Write down every part of your brand on one sheet of paper: mark, colours, typeface, name, tagline, photography style. Then cross out the name and ask yourself whether a customer would still pick your product off a shelf. If the answer is no, the name is carrying too much, and that is worth fixing long before any export conversation begins.