So who was it that first said that the company should be called NERD? I was quite surprised when Shimada-san brought it forward as a suggestion. It does work great as an acronym for Nintendo European Research and Development. Like it was fate for this to happen.
Well, we have regular meetings with the team leaders and we were talking about how the name Mobiclip didn’t really fit what we did any more. We thought that we needed to find a name that matched our new work. So we thought about it quite seriously. (laughs)
It was a serious and logical process.
Exactly. (laughs) We wanted the name to show that we are part of Nintendo. We also wanted to show that we are doing research and development, and that we are based in Europe and have a European perspective and ambition. But I couldn’t find a good name. We aren’t always logical in the team, we can be quite imaginative too, so we got the idea that maybe we shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously. (laughs) Then Jérémy28 who manages the production here came to me saying he had a name. (laughs)28. Jérémy: Jérémy Denise, Chief Production Officer at NERD.
So everyone at the company decided to accept this joke name as a serious candidate?
We weren’t sure if it would succeed. At first it was kind of a joke. But we found that it fits perfectly with our style, our goal and our dream. Our wives weren’t so happy about us calling ourselves nerds though. (laughs) But the name is really clever and the engineers were saying “Oh, that’s a great idea.”
The word “nerd” is sometimes used in a positive sense and sometimes in a negative sense, isn’t it? But I guess you could say the people here are proud of being “NERD”s.
Exactly, it’s what sets you apart from others. Perhaps we weren’t the most visible people at school: we were interested in computers and maths, and nobody cared about what we did. But now we can be proud to be “NERD”s. We feel like we are in a family where “NERD”s are considered valuable.
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