The creator of Sonic the Hedgehog has weighed in on the pronunciation of Hydrocity Zone from Sonic the Hedgehog 3 on Sega Genesis. The old-school video games often have bizarre pronunciations for different names, thanks to language barriers and a lack of voice acting. This has included the English pronunciation of Live A Live taking nearly thirty years to be officially revealed.
One video game level pronunciation that has been debated by fans for years is Hydrocity Zone from Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Sonic & Knuckles. The two most common schools of thought say that Hydrocity is pronounced as one word that rhymes with velocity, while the other says it's pronounced as two words - Hydro-City. The latter name would seem to fit the best, as the stage does involve ancient ruins with water sections, while proponents of the former name point out it's written as one word.
The debate about Hydrocity Zone has been revived by the recent release of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 in Sonic Origins. A Twitter user named Ethan Ellis decided to go straight to the source, as they asked Sonic the Hedgehog creator Yuji Naka on Twitter about how the name is pronounced. Naka admitted he doesn't speak English, but he believes that it's pronounced "Hydro-city", two words instead of one.
The language barrier is the main issue, as many 16-bit games were developed in Japan, during a time when localization was more of an afterthought than it is today. The strange and incorrect localization choices led to a number of video game urban legends, such as the mysterious character who needs help in Chrono Trigger, or Shen Long in Street Fighter 2. The Pokémon series has names that confuse fans to this day, like Arceus and Suicune, even though it has an animated series that offers examples of how they're supposed to be pronounced. It doesn't help that different regions have used different pronunciations in their promotional material, such as Sega being pronounced See-Ga, rather than Say-ga in Australia.
The Sonic the Hedgehog series has a passionate fanbase that will likely continue to argue about the pronunciation of Hydrocity Zone, using Naka's lack of familiarity with the English language as a reason to keep the debate going. The language issues with the Sonic the Hedgehog stage names could also have been shockingly bad, as there was once a stage called Genocide City in Sonic the Hedgehog 2, but it was scrapped during development. The developers of the Sonic the Hedgehog games likely never put too much thought into the names of the zones, and they couldn't didn't predict fans would be talking about them decades later.
Source: Yuji Naka/Twitter