Nintendo Weighs in How to Pronounce "NES" - Was This Even a Debate?

I say tomato, you say toMAto. I say Mario, you say Mair-rio, and I punch you in the face. Apparently, all these years, the internet has been the battleground an even more confounded pronunciation debate, that being the proper way to enunciate “NES,” the acronym for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

The two rivaling camps in this heated argument are those who pronounce it like Earthbound protagonist “Ness” and those who missed a week of elementary school and unfortunately believed their whole life that “s” always sounds like a “z,” resulting in “Nez.”

Eurogamer’s writing staff tossed the debate around their office for half an hour but turned to Nintendo for answers hopefully in time before any blood was drawn. Tucked away in Wario Ware Gold, available now for the Nintendo 3DS, the debate concluded with a little help from Japanese phonetics.

Technically, the Japanese text writes it as “Ne-su” if we’re going to be hardcore about it, but the best way to translate the Japanese into English, in this case, would be “Ness.” Indeed, Japanese does have a “z” sound that is often used in both its own and foreign words… but not here.