who was the legend of zelda named after
Princess Zelda According to Shigeru Miyamoto, co-creator of The Legend of Zelda series, Princess Zelda's name was inspired by that of Zelda Fitzgerald, an American novelist, dancer, and socialite, as well as the wife of fellow novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. Miyamoto explains, "[Fitzgerald] was a famous and beautiful woman from all accounts, and I liked the sound of her name. So I took the liberty of using her name for the very first Zelda title."[4] Ben Reeves of Game Informer elaborated that the "name Zelda (alternately Selda or Segula) might not be used much anymore, but this old Yiddish name means 'blessed, happy, or lucky.'"[5]
Final Fantasy In the mid-1980s, Square entered the Japanese video game industry with simple RPGs, racing games, and platformers for Nintendo's Famicom Disk System. In 1987, Square designer Hironobu Sakaguchi chose to create a new fantasy role-playing game for the cartridge-based NES, and drew inspiration from popular fantasy games: Enix's Dragon Quest, Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda, and Origin Systems's Ultima series. Though often attributed to the company allegedly facing bankruptcy, Sakaguchi explained that the game was his personal last-ditch effort in the game industry and that its title, Final Fantasy, stemmed from his feelings at the time; had the game not sold well, he would have quit the business and gone back to university.[92][93][94] Despite his explanation, publications have also attributed the name to the company's hopes that the project would solve its financial troubles.[93][95] In 2015, Sakaguchi explained the name's origin: the team wanted a title that would abbreviate to "FF", which would sound good in Japanese. The name was originally going to be Fighting Fantasy, but due to concerns over trademark conflicts with the roleplaying gamebook series of the same name, they needed to settle for something else. As the word "Final" was a famous word in Japan, Sakaguchi settled on that. According to Sakaguchi, any title that created the "FF" abbreviation would have done.[96]