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gbdev / pandocs

The single, most comprehensive Game Boy technical reference.
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Spelling: Game licensees #430

Open ihonen opened 2 years ago

ihonen commented 2 years ago

So, there are a bunch of issues with the list of new licensees in The Cartridge Header:

Then there's the list of old licensees that is not yet in the Pan Docs at all (instead, it is linked to). It's a real mess, with the name of almost every licensee being incorrectly spelled for whatever reason.

Incorrect spelling is easy enough to fix, but in some cases the correct spelling is not trivial to establish. In particular, there are two policy decisions that need to be made:

  1. Should the licensees be identified by their full names (Tokuma Shoten Intermedia, Kemco Japan, Sculptured Software) or their colloquial names (Tokuma Shoten, Kemco, Sculptured)?
  2. How should licensees that have since changed their names be identified? For example, Ubi Soft still exists but is now known as Ubisoft. On the other hand, Hi Tech Entertainment no longer exists but used to be called Hi Tech Expressions, and so on. Some companies may even have changed their names between the release of their first and last Game Boy games.

I'll gladly fix the spellings once we are clear on how to tackle the issue.

ihonen commented 2 years ago

My personal take:

  1. I think it would be the better approach to identify licensees by their colloquial names. This is also the way most licensees are identified at the moment.
  2. Honestly, I don't know how to account for name changes. Maybe pick the name most prominently associated with the company in that era and mention the other names in footnotes? Although I'm not sure the name history of any given company is within the scope of the document.
aaaaaa123456789 commented 2 years ago

I'd say that whatever the companies/groups call themselves (in media, documentation, etc.) is an adequate designation for them. Usually, for companies, this will be a short form of the full legal name of the company.

If some licensee has changed names since then, this could be indicated in a parenthetical or a footnote: "Ubisoft (Ubi Soft until 2003-09-09)".

avivace commented 2 years ago

I'd say that whatever the companies/groups call themselves (in media, documentation, etc.) is an adequate designation for them. Usually, for companies, this will be a short form of the full legal name of the company.

If some licensee has changed names since then, this could be indicated in a parenthetical or a footnote: "Ubisoft (Ubi Soft until 2003-09-09)".

I agree with this. We could even link the Wikipedia pages as that one will always point to an updated entry

ISSOtm commented 2 years ago

+1 on the above, seems like consensus enough!