While looking for some old stuff, I just found an explanation for the misspellings of “Nintendo” found on the Virtual Lab box and cartridge that a professional translator gave me a few years ago.

When the back of the box it says “Ninntenndo” that’s probably due to a Japanese person writing it without having it checked afterwards. 😛

You see, in Japanese word processing the “n” is a special character that only is converted to hiragana or katakana if pressed twice on the keyboard.

n will result in n
and nn will turn into ん

Of course if you type another consonant after the n it will convert to ん automatically, but a lot of Japanese people just are so used to it that they write double ns even when they’re writing Roman letters.

Yep… that’s the explanation I’ve always heard as well.

DogP