My favourite Zelda game is not Ocarina of
Time, nor Breath of the Wild. Those games have huge worlds and grand stories. But I prefer the little world of Link’s
Awakening. It’s so quaint and tiny. But surrounding this game is a 20 year long
battle, and it’s all about one little word. When Nintendo created Link’s Awakening in
the 90s, I don’t think anyone could have known just how much trouble this one word
would cause them. Let’s start at the beginning, with the original
Japanese version of Link’s Awakening for the Game Boy, in glorious green and black. Now, in case you didn’t know, this game
was originally started as a secret project for a few developers at Nintendo. After their work was done for the day, in
the evenings this group of developers would gather to work on a very weird and unique
Zelda game for the Game Boy. The project was never meant to be serious,
but a few months on, they decided to show the game to their bosses at Nintendo. And to their delight, these bosses loved it! And that's how Link’s Awakening got its
start. So because of that, the game is very weird. Yoshi is in it, Goombas are in it, a Chain
Chomp is in it, and almost every character you talk is a little bit unique, to put it
nicely. And in the Summer of 1993, the game was released
in Japan. People loved it, and the game was a big success. And so, a few months later, Nintendo of America
started working on an English translation of the game, in order to bring Link’s Awakening
to American audiences. And the man in charge of writing the English
script was Dan Owsen. Just a few years ago he’d done the English
script for A Link to Past, so it was no surprise that he was back for the game’s follow-up,
too! However, as Owsen worked his way through writing
all of the English text for the game, he came across one character who posed a bit of a
problem, or at least some difficulty. Right at the beginning of the game, you wake
up in this little house. You leave the house, and as you explore the
village, you’ll bump into THIS old lady, sweeping the floor. If you speak to her, the very first thing
she says is “iyahō!” In fact, EVERY time you talk to her, the very
first thing she’ll say is “iyahō!” But what is this character’s name, even? Who is she? Well, in the game itself, her name is never
actually mentioned - she's nameless! But luckily, the game also has a manual. And inside the manual, there's descriptions
of the characters from the game. While this old lady doesn’t actually have
a description of her own, her HUSBAND does. It says “...his wife is the woman who loves
to sweep, Iyahō-obaasan.” Now, obaasan means grandma, or old lady. So her name, according to the manual, is Old
Lady Iyahō! So, why does she pose such difficulty? Well, it’s that one word, Iyahō! In Japanese, there’s a fairly common greeting:
“yahō!” Yahō! So, the first thought when translating this
woman’s catchphrase is to go with a casual English greeting, like “hey”, or “heya!” However, the woman isn’t actually saying
“yahō”, she says “iyahō!” There’s an “ee” sound at the start. (That's why I've been saying her name kinda
weirdly...) And that is not a common Japanese greeting. It’s weird. It would sound strange to Japanese speakers. So when he wrote the English script for Link's
Awakening, Dan Owsen decided to emphasise that weirdness of it, and instead of going
with a common English greeting, he went with something kinda weird in English: Yahoo! And so, that became her name... Grandma Yahoo! Every time you speak to her in the game, she
starts her sentences with "yahoo!" However, little did Dan Oswen know that a
decade down the line, his decision would have some, well, unexpected consequences… In 1994, one year after Link’s Awakening
came out, something else happened on the other side of the world. A website was founded, called Yahoo. Double u double u double u dot yahoo dot com. You could search for things on the internet,
you could check the weather, it was pretty neat. The year is now 2011, and Nintendo have a
new handheld console, the 3DS. It’s E3, and Shigeru Miyamoto himself announces
that the Virtual Console, where you can play old games on new systems, is coming to 3DS
that very day. And the first two games available would be
Super Mario Land and Link’s Awakening. Now, this was really cool, now a whole new
group of people could experience this game! That’s also how I found and fell in love
with Link’s Awakening. So, I’m gonna dig up my 3DS, because I wanna
show you something really interesting in the game. Normally, these virtual console versions of
old games are untouched. They don’t fix bugs, they don’t change
the graphics or the text. But look at this. First, I’ll leave the house that I woke
up in. Then, I’ll go find the old lady. And look. HELLO! She says Hello!! What on earth happened? What happened to Yahoo!? Well, if we look into things a bit more, it
turns out that Nintendo actually removed every single mention of Yahoo from Link's Awakening
script. Some of the time, yahoo is replaced with hello,
as you saw, and sometimes they replace it with yippee, which I guess is a little more
fun at least. It’s not just in the game itself though. I don’t want to be dramatic, but Nintendo
went out of their way to purge this one word from all Zelda media. Let me show you. In 2018, they released a book called The Zelda
Encyclopaedia. This was a big, thick book full of information
about the entire Zelda series. Every single Zelda game has pages and pages
of information about it, including Link’s Awakening. And here, there’s this chart of every character
in the game. Here's Old Man Ulrira, and here is the sweeping
woman. Her name is not Grandma Yahoo anymore. Instead they changed it to Grandma Ulrira! Dun dun dun! So, what about the game’s manual, where
Grandma Yahoo’s name was first mentioned in Japanese? Well, the English version doesn’t mention
Grandma Yahoo’s name at all. It’s been completely removed. So, what on earth is going on here? Why did Nintendo go out of their way to get
rid of the word yahoo? Well, you can probably take a good guess. Between the creation of the original game
in the 1990s, and this release in 2011, a major event had taken place. The web giant Yahoo had been created, in by
the 2000s it had become a behemoth of the internet. As game translation expert Clyde Mandelin
explained, “Presumably, this change was made because “YAHOO!” – including the
all-caps spelling and the exclamation mark at the end – has since become a giant global
corporation and household name.” So, while Nintendo have unsurprisingly not
explained their reasoning for this removal, the only plausible explanation is that it
seemed a little too risky to have this company’s trademark plastered throughout their game. Either they were worried about getting some
kind of legal threat from the company, or more likely, they just didn’t Yahoo's logo
all throughout Link's Awakening. What about in Japanese, though? Did Nintendo remove that original “iyahō”
from the game? No, they didn’t! If you play the game in its original language,
then the sweeping woman’s catchphrase remains intact. So, why is this? Well, Yahoo’s Japanese name is not “iyahō”,
it’s “yahū”, which sounds a lot closer to the original. So while in English, yahoo and yahoo are identical,
in Japanese, they’re completely different. Iyahō and yahū. So, there’s no clash, or trademark issue
there. And so, the japanese version of Link’s Awakening
is untouched. And if I made this video a couple of years
ago, this would be where things ended. With yahoo completely purged from the Zelda
series. However, there is now a twist! Because one rainy February evening in 2019,
Nintendo revealed a big surprise they had up their sleeve. They were remaking Link’s Awakening from
the ground up for the Nintendo Switch. It had this beautiful anime style opening,
and the graphics were just breathtaking! But while I watched this original reveal trailer,
there was one little question on my mind: what would happen to Yahoo? Would Nintendo bring it back, or was it really
gone forever? Well as I happened, I got my answer before
the game even launched. At E3 later in the year, some Nintendo employees
were demonstrating the game, just wandering around that opening area in the village. And on the corner of the screen was the woman
sweeping. The person playing the game walked up to her,
and just look... Yahoo! She says Yahoo again! For the first time in 20 years. But not only that, just look at her name:
Grandma Yahoo! In English, the character’s name was never
actually confirmed to be Grandma Yahoo up until now! This was the first time they had ever official
translated her name as Grandma Yahoo, and believe me, I was very happy about it! But why? What changed? Well, we can only theorise, since again Nintendo
have not talked about the Yahoo incident. However, while in 2011 Yahoo was an internet
giant, in 2019 things had changed. Yahoo was still around, sure, but they had
fallen pretty spectacularly in terms of users. I would imagine that Nintendo weren’t so
worried about having their name featured in Link’s Awakening anymore. So, that is the story of Grandma Yahoo, who
I think is one of the most interesting characters from one of my favourite games. If you’ve never played Link’s Awakening,
I’d highly recommend it! And hey, every time you speak to Grandma Yahoo,
you can fully appreciate the journey it took to get this ONE little word into the game. Hey, thank you for watching to the end! Subscribe and turn on notifications to see
next week’s video as soon as possible. And I’ll see you next time then - bye bye!
