Professional translator Clyde Mandelin has shed light on a single word that has been repeatedly changed over the years in The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening.
The 1998 DX version of the title features an old lady in it, who says "YAHOO!" throughout the course of the game. This line was supposedly changed by someone at Nintendo of America to "HELLO!" when it was re-released on the 3DS Virtual Console in 2011. It's believed to have been adjusted because the original line (which includes an exclamation mark) was too similar to Yahoo! – the global search engine corporation.
It doesn't end there, though. While you might have already known about this, earlier this year in September, the remake of Link's Awakening obviously arrived on the Switch. It essentially added another chapter to the story – with Mandelin pointing out how the line "YAHOO!" is now back in the game (see above).
The translator also explains how this wasn't an issue in the Japanese release:
Note that this change wasn’t made to the Japanese version of the game because the old lady’s Japanese phrase, iyahō, doesn’t match the Japanese name for YAHOO! Inc., yafū.
Although it might seem like Nintendo was worried about using the line "YAHOO!" due to possible legal issues, there's no guarantee this was necessarily why it was changed in the first place.
[source legendsoflocalization.com]
Comments 35
For a second I thought Links Awakening somehow killed the search engine.....Shame it didn't -_-
Did Yahoo! pay for the product placement?
Are you Yahoo Serious?
You can't, like, own a word, man, otherwise the producers of "It" would be making a killing.
@Silly_G SOOOOO TRUE!
I registered a company's name: Yes™, now everyone has to pay me money if they use the name in any commercial media.
Whenever I hear Yahoo I think of the chocolate milk instead of the site. lol
Yeah it's been in there like 3 months now.
@Joeynator3000 Does it taste anything like Yoohoo?
The line on the GBC ROM is just text without anything special, the Nintendo guy that worked on that VC release must have been ecstatic.
Isn't it weird that the second YAHOO! (the one replaced with YIPPEE!) already contained an extra space? It's like they knew when they were writing the original translation.
But apparently this is just how the text boxes are formated, they'd use spaces to center and make the text nicer looking I guess.
I feel like there should now be a meme where a trademark name replaces "YAHOO!'"
"ALEXA! I'm fine, and you?!"
Obviously YAHOO! is owned by Toad and only he can say it
@shinesprites I aim to please.
I'm no copyright lawyer, but wouldn't the game be considered "prior art" or something? It came out in the US in 1993, and Yahoo! wasn't founded until a year later. Do new printings of books have to remove any words that have become copyrighted in the intervening time since the first pressing?
@DanElectrode For trademarks “YAHOO!” in the game is not prior art. It would be only considered “prior art” if “YAHOO!” was previously used to distinguish product/services as coming from a particular party in the same or similar product/service categories. Note that the capitalisation and the exclamation are part of the trademark and give the mark it’s distinctiveness.
Does anybody remember that Yahoo sound effect from the 2000s?
I’m not a layer but would have thought Nintendo would be safe here seeing as the text and game came long before the search engine...
Probably because nobody uses Yahoo anymore - I mean, nobody used it in 2011 either, but it's got like, minus users now.
Have the framerate issues been fixed in this game yet?
So did they just release a new patch?
Slow news day..
Don't like the fonts used in modern Nintendo games
Wouldn't "yoohoo" make more sense?
Never really thought about this as I just thought she was a mental old lady.
She is using a broom on grass.
@sanderev Did you actually just post 'slow news day' on Christmas Eve?
Wow. Just wow.
@Joeynator3000 Aren’t you thinking of Yoo-Hoo? Similar, but different
Also, if I'm not mistaken, 'yahoo' is how the inteligent horses called the savage humans in Gulliver's Travels. Way before the company even existed!
Yahoo! I read was founded in 1994, between the original (1993) and DX (1998) versions of the original.
I recall also that Pokemon Black and White 2 (released in 2012) used Yahoo! somewhere as well. Or maybe it was BW1, who localization was released (March 2011, just before the 3DS) three months before the VC release of LADX (at E3).
Fairly certain at this stage Yahoo needs to pay Nintendo to feature their name in a Nintendo game.
Eh, I guess back then when I was young, I thought it was Yahoo. shrugs
Surely, WAHOO! would have sufficed?
@Silly_G it's like Google. You can't own it per se. It's a number. However no one else can have a product called Google in search, cloud... Maybe computing entirely. There was no copyright problem here, though. It's not like Nintendo is building a search engine or even a function called Yahoo!... There's another underlying reason for this change and I'm willing to bet it was simply a creative decision and this is being too deeply looked at.
@nintendork64 : Certainly, but I should point out that the number is googol not Google. Google is a trademark, and the word didn't exist in popular usage beyond that trademark (from memory), though it has since been adopted by the public as a generic trademark, where the word "googling" refers to searching for something online, regardless of the actual platform or search engine used, and likewise with Band-aid, Coke, and countless others.
Copyright laws obviously vary wildly by jurisdiction, but considering that the word doesn't really exist independent of its trademark, the owners could perhaps sue if another company decided to capitalise on the name for their own material benefit (or if the naming would jeopardise the image of the existing brand Google).
There was a bit of a strange copyright dispute concerning Burger King in Australia, which is known as Hungry Jacks due to the fact that there was an independent family-owned business by the name of Burger King prior to the global brand attempting to break in to the Australian market. There was a brief and unsuccessful attempt to revert the name to Burger King circa 2003-2004 (I recall seeing a few Burger Kings pop up), but they were unsuccessful.
@Joeynator3000 thought that was Yazoo?!
Link’s Awakening was released about a year before Yahoo’s website was even founded so Nintendo should have trademarked that word lol
Just when I thoucht nobody uses Yahoo nowadats, I just remember it is very popular on Japan, at least the mail service.
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