Who Put the Pit in Kid Icarus?
I’m starting this project off with a post about Kid Icarus because this game meant a lot to me back in the day. But even if I loved it, it still took me years to figure out why its hero was named after a hole in the ground.
Basically, I liked Kid Icarus when no one else did. I was a Greek mythology nerd, and I took to the monsters from these stories the way normal kids take to dinosaurs or Transformers. When I saw Kid Icarus on the shelf at my local rental store, I could not resist the prospect of seeing these familiar characters being rendered in the pixelated, 8-bit style that I was quickly beginning to love. But while knowing a thing or two about Greek mythology helped me appreciate the game in a deeper way, sometimes what I knew beforehand just made me confused. Why, for example, was the boss of the first area of the game called Twinbellows when he was so obviously Cerberus? Or at least Cerberus minus one of his three heads?
That is a reasonable question with a surprising answer, but let’s begin with Pit.
When the creators of the cartoon series Captain N: The Game Master decided that Kid Icarus was a game that kids might care about, they decided to drop the name he’s given in the game’s instruction manual and just call the character Kid Icarus. I get it. Pit is a weird name, and I suppose if the purpose of Captain N was to increase viewers’ brand recognition of specific games, it makes sense to say those names as often as possible. This does not explain why those same creators decided the character would have an improbable speech impediment that made him really irritating to listen to, but hey — at least they made strong choices.
People who did remember the Captain N version of the character but who never played the actual game might have been surprised to learn his proper, official name when Nintendo revived him in 2008 for Smash Bros. Brawl. This was an older- and tougher-looking version of Pit that made sense in the Smash Bros. lineup but also made the origin of his name even harder to guess.
It seemed obvious, once it was pointed out to me, that Pit’s Japanese name — ピット, Pitto — might come from the Japanese name for a character from Roman mythology that has nonetheless achieved a cross-cultural presence: Cupid — or as it would be rendered in Japanese, キューピッド, Kyūpiddo, or キューピット, Kyūpitto, the latter being even closer to Pit’s Japanese name. If I had this information floating in my head at some point, it long since got buried by a lot of other video game trivia, and it was specifically the Retronauts podcast’s Kid Icarus episode that reminded me that this otherwise inexplicable character name has an origin that’s just *barely* hidden but nonetheless hidden enough that plenty of English-speakers wouldn’t be aware of it.
Being a winged youth in classical Greek fashion, Pit would seem to take some inspiration from the mythological character of Icarus. Both Pit and Icarus are famous for flying, though neither does it all that well. But Pit probably has as much in common with Cupid, especially when you consider Pit’s original, cutesier form, when the arrows he fights with were depicted as having heart-shaped tips, keeping in line with the associations of Cupid and his Greek counterpart, Eros — literally “desire.” The Kid Icarus games are full of hearts, though oddly they don’t represent Pit’s health the way they do Link’s health in Zelda; instead, they function as the game’s currency, and dead enemies yield hearts that Pit exchanges for items in shops.
Flyer for the Japanese release of Kid Icarus, translating as “Shine light on Angel Land! / Your courage is what will save Palutena, Goddess of Light. / The time is long, long ago. The peaceful country of Angel Land has been transformed by the goddess Medusa into a world of darkness where demons roam. Pit the angel set out on a long and difficult journey to save Palutena, the Goddess of Light, from Medusa and restore peace to Angel Land once again.”
Nintendo has never officially said that yes, Pit is a riff on Cupid, but the Cupid explanation for his name seems more plausible than it coming from the Italian putto or from the Pythian games. Cupid seems even more central to Pit when you consider that in Japan, Icarus is not part of the title and not an association Nintendo wanted to invoke. The original game is 光神話 パルテナの鏡, “Legend of Light: Palutena’s Mirror,” and the most recent installment is 新・光神話 パルテナの鏡, “New Legend of Light: Palutena’s Mirror.” (The Game Boy sequel, Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters, was not released in Japan and therefore doesn’t have an official Japanese title.) The closest official links that I find are both in Kid Icarus: Uprising. For one, the weapon called Angel’s Bow in English is known in Japan as キューピッドの神弓 — Kyūpiddo no Shinkyū, or “Cupid’s Divine Bow.” The other occurs in the Japanese version of the game when Pit first encounters the character Viridi and she cracks a joke about Pit being “a cupid” and therefore “cheesy” — essentially commenting how he is a cliché. In the English version of this scene, Viridi makes a different joke, saying, “Pit, huh? What are YOU? A hole in the ground?” In both instances, references to cupids were stripped from the English version of the game, either because the cupid connection is only clear in Japanese or because Nintendo didn’t want players thinking of the hero as a winged love baby.
If that gives something of an answer for Pit, then what about some of the other strange character names introduced in the original NES game? And why is the game’s resident Cerberus-like character called Twinbellows, of all things?
Well, it seems like Twinbellows is an example of a phenomenon that happens in video games translated from Japanese to English, wherein the translation process doesn’t preserve the original reference and ends up making a new thing, more or less. In Japan, the character’s name is ツインベロス, Tsuinberosu, presumably a portmanteau of “twin” and the Japanese pronunciation of ケルベロス, Keruberosu, “Cerberos.” I don’t know if berosu was rendered as “bellows” accidentally or not, but the end result of that choice was creating a unique name that Nintendo kept for subsequent appearances. Intentional branding or not, the name actually does make some sense in English, because it’s a two-headed monster that shoots fireballs, and the second part of the name could be read as either the verb “to bellow” — to make a loud, roaring noise — or a bellows, which is an instrument used to stoke a fire.
In order, Twinbellows’ original NES sprite, art from the instruction manual, upgraded appearance in Kid Icarus: Uprising
(No, I don’t know why Twinbellows was designed with only two heads. Yes, there is also Orthrus, a two-headed dog in Greek mythology that was killed by Hercules. The name still seems like it’s a play on Cerberus.)
Other Kid Icarus names are more obvious. The boss Hewdraw, for example, is clearly supposed to be a Hydra, with the Japanese name ヒュードラ, Hyūdorā, being translated in a way that is still close enough to the original reference. I get a kick out of the ones that are harder to spot, at least for people who don’t speak Japanese, and one of the goals I have with this project is to give people those “This thing is this other thing!” realization moments showing that a familiar character like Pit or Twinbellows is actually referencing another familiar thing, just in a way that’s hidden by the quirks of translation.
Miscellaneous Notes
There’s a Kid Icarus connection with Sennen Kazoku (“Thousand-Year Family”), a life-simulation game sort of akin to Animal Crossing, developed by Indieszero and released by Nintendo for the Game Boy Advance in 2005. The title never made it outside Japan. In an interview with the creators, it’s mentioned that this game’s hero, a cupid, was designed to look like Pit.
“Cupid was created after we completed the prototype and decided to change the game to be from a third-person perspective. We based him on… Nintendo’s character from Kid Icarus. [Toru] Osawa was also the producer for this game, so we thought it was fitting,” explains Masunobu Suzui, the director of Sennen Kazoku. And then Hirotaka Watanabe, the game’s chief planner, adds, “When we were talking with Osawa, we were trying to decide if the player should be God, or if there were gods with a ranking system… things like that. By using Pit from Kid Icarus as the inspiration for Cupid, it made it easier for our designer… and Suzui to go back and forth to come up with the final design.”
This character, sometimes referred to as Cupit, appears as a sticker in Smash Bros. Brawl and as a spirit in Smash Bros. Ultimate.