Take-Two is reducing its fiscal 2009 guidance to reflect several factors, most significant of which is the movement of the launch of BioShock 2 from the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009 to fiscal 2010, in order to provide additional development time for the title. Additionally, Take-Two is updating third quarter and fourth quarter fiscal 2009 guidance to reflect reduced sales of catalog products and lower than anticipated initial retailer orders of new releases, due to a retail environment that is proving even more challenging than the Company’s previous expectations.
…translates into English as “leave luck to heaven.” The name made more sense before Nintendo got into the video game business; it opened in 1889 to make hanafuda cards, a type of Japanese playing cards decorated with floral designs.
Sony
…in 1946, it had a decidedly less catchy name – Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo. Within a few years, the company’s founders wanted a new name, so they combined sonus, Latin for “sound,” with “Sonny,” the term of endearment for a young boy. The newly coined word captured both the superior sound quality and small size the company was shooting for with its products.
Sega
…in Hawaii in 1940 as Standard Games, a business that provided military bases with pinball machines to help amuse soldiers. In 1951, the company moved to Tokyo and renamed itself “Service Games” to reflect its business of importing coin-op machines for American military bases. In 1965, Service Games merged with another coin-op company, Rosen Enterprises, and shortened its name to Sega.
Atari
The video-game pioneer takes its name the board game Go. In Go, atari is a term that indicates that a player’s stone (or group of a player’s stones) are in immediate danger of being captured by the player’s opponent.
Coleco
The video game kingpins of the 1970s and 80s (and the people who brought you Cabbage Patch Dolls!), Coleco was originally a company that sold shoe leather. The name Coleco is a shortening of “Connecticut Leather Company.”
In 1983, the arcade smash hit Donkey Kong was ported to the Atari 400/800 home computer systems by Landon Dyer. It was at the time the best home computer/console port for this game.
Mr. Dyer, in between pulling his hair out while working on this game, included what is known as an “Easter Egg” in the game’s code. If a certain sequence of moves or scores were done correctly, the designer’s initials would appear somewhere on the screen. He writes on his blog, “There’s an easter egg, but it’s totally not worth it, and I don’t remember how to bring it up anyway (something like: Die on the ’sandpile’ level with 3 lives and the score over 7,000).”
The Digital Press web site has a whole section dedicated to Easter eggs, and they are even offering cash rewards to those who can find out how to trigger them. Even Landon Dyer himself did not remember how to trigger this Easter egg in Donkey Kong for the Atari home computers. It was suggested on the Digital Press site that the initials would appear in the bonus score box.
He goes on to explain how he performed this game archaeology by digging through the assembly code dirt. He also links to Landon Dyer’s blog entry on porting Donkey Kong to Atari. It itself is a geeky fun game folklore read.
