Nokia N-Gage Coined by...

The short answer: me, Victor Palacios.

This is a story that has been in the back of my brain for many years. A few years ago, after a conversation about Nokia with somebody I met at a social event, I did a Google search about the name N-Gage and went to the Wikipedia entry and read that some director was the originator of the name, and I thought, “of course…”. That reference has been removed sometime since. In some fandom sites they mention that the name has not been accredited to anyone. So I am fixing that today.

Nokia N-Gage (Image from Wikipedia)

I started working at Nokia Vancouver in December 1999 as a software engineer. I am not quite sure but I think I started on my birthday, December 14th, which was kind of weird. I have actually worked for Nokia on two different occasions. The second time was in Montreal in December 2009 as a contractor for a UX Designer position replacing somebody who was on maternity leave, what’s up with those December starting dates? but I digress. Sometime in 2000-2001 I switched jobs from software engineer to UI Designer, which was one of the most interesting and consequential decisions of my life. 

Sometime in 2002 when the UI team had grown from 1 person (me) to probably 6 people, while we were working on the next generation phone, later called the 7710, we received an email about this program called Starship which was the phone that later became the N-Gage. They were starting a competition for a marketing name for the program. They gave you the summary about the device and the target market was gamers. They were offering, I think, 250 or 300 dollars (Canadian), to the person who would come up with the winning name. Oddly enough I am not a gamer so I walked to my colleague Scott Davis' desk, another UI Designer, and asked him something along the lines “What makes a game a good game?” and he said, “it has to be engaging, something, something, …” I don’t remember what else he said, but that was what resonated in my head. So I went back to my desk and started writing a bunch of names. One of them was N-Gage.

Words just don’t come up like that. Another part of the story is that at that time we had a volleyball team as part of Nokia’s social activities. Nokia even paid for a coach to help us become reasonable players. And what would you know? We also did a competition for a name. No price money was offered though, just bragging rights I guess. So I came up with the name “Nokia Nokouts”. During some games against other teams or on TV I would see some players hitting the ball so hard that I used to think “man! Somebody is going to be knocked out!”. It was scary to be on the receiving end of those players. Anyway, we had t-shirts printed with the name and logo, it was nice.

So I already had the pattern in my head about “Nokia sounding word” then “some other interesting word”, like “Nokout”. So when it came to the starship program, and with Scott’s prompt, that was one of the first names that came to mind, engage -> Nokia engage -> Nokia N-Gage. But I thought I had to come up with other names; but they were not as satisfying as the first one. I asked Scott, what about Nokia N-Gage? And he said, that’s pretty good, you should submit it. So I did.

A few days passed, some high executives were in town, and they announced they were going to pick a name for the Starship program during that visit to then compete with other names from other office sites, so we waited, while doing our regular work of course.

A couple of hours or so before the winner was announced a friend from marketing came over to my desk and told me, “hey’ your name was selected, but one of the top shots is taking it as his own. You know how it is…”. I said something like “yeah, OK, whatever. Thanks for letting me know”. He said something like “Have you ever considered being in Marketing?” and I said “No, not really”. I think Scott was like “you should sue them!”. I did nothing. In my head I kind of chucked it to “I have so many ideas pouring out of my ears, this is free”, but that was a cop out to avoid conflict.

Now you know where the N-Gage name came from; with a little help from my friends.

Postscript

A couple of things about me. I am high in Openness and Agreeableness, in terms of psychological profile that means I am a creative person and avoid conflict. The second part has been a real handicap throughout my life; lots of people have taken advantage of that. Until I came across the big 5 model of personality and understood that this is part of my personality. And most psychologists help you become a little bit more disagreeable. The dark side of being an agreeable person and others taking advantage of it, is that you can become resentful and bitter. That’s why clinical psychologists help you fight for your things and place limits or boundaries. It is a slow process but it does improve your life. It is uncomfortable as hell to enforce those limits though.