Dr. Eggman

The main nemesis of Sonic the Hedgehog is one who has gone by a couple names. In the earlier, Genesis-era games, he was mostly referred to as Dr. Ivo Robotnik. In the later games, he still retained this name, but was referred to often as Eggman or Dr. Eggman, obviously in reference to the shape of the villain. This may have been a bit confusing to some, but the reasoning behind the naming has finally been revealed.

Head of Sonic Team, Takashi Iizuka, recently sat down with Game Informer to answer some questions about the Sonic series and many of its characters. One of the questions was why Robotnik was called Eggman, and the response was amusing, if a bit unsurprising. According to Iizuka, the name has always been Eggman, but when the game was localized to the West, somebody on the team changed his name to Dr. Robotnik without consulting the development team. Obviously, it couldn't be taken back after the games became popular, so this was fixed in time by saying that Eggman is a nickname for the character, while Robotnik is his real name. Here's the quote:

When the game was originally developed in Japan, they called the character Eggman. That was the name of the character, but when the game got localized and ported into the Sonic the Hedgehog that we know in the West, they decided to, without confirming with the development team, change his name to Ivo Robotnik or just Robotnik. That's kind of when everyone first learned about the character. Of course, this was without consulting the people who made the game. They just kind of went off and did it. It became super popular and everyone in the West kind of learned about the character as Robotnik. That went on through the "classic" series in the Genesis/Mega Drive era, but as far as the developers are concerned - the ones who made the character and the leaders of what this character is doing next - we really didn't want to have anyone in the universe with two names. To us, he's Eggman, but in the rest of the world he's called Robotnik. We wanted to unify that into one name moving forward. This is something I actually did in the Sonic Adventure series. I made it so that we understand the character's name is Robotnik, but his nickname is Eggman, and as far as everyone is concerned in the world now, we're just going to call him Eggman as his official name.

What do you think? Do you call him Eggman, or Dr. Robotnik? Drop us a comment in the section below.

[source gameinformer.com]