Early in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (1987), the player walks into a house in the town of Ruto, where a bearded man in a purple tunic announces: "I am Error." For decades, gamers filed it alongside "All your base are belong to us" as botched translation. The Japanese original reads "My name is Error…" — the line was translated correctly. His name really is Error.
The joke's other half lives in a hidden house in a forest south of town: an identical man in a red tunic named Bagu — Japanese for "Bug." Error and Bug, a matched programmer pair. The localizers translated Erā to Error but left Bagu untranslated, so English-speaking players never saw the setup. As Official Nintendo Magazine put it: "In reality, then, Bagu is the mistake, because his name was translated wrongly and should have been Bug. So there."
"I am Error" became an internet meme around 2000 and has been referenced in Super Paper Mario, The Binding of Isaac, and Guacamelee! Nintendo itself eventually embraced the character: from roughly 2012 to 2015, the 404 page at nintendo.co.uk read "I am Error."
Previously:
• Ocarina of Time is getting a ground-up remake on Switch 2
• Sealed 1985 Super Mario Bros game fetches record $3m at auction
