Company: HAL Laboratory

In a 2012 Iwata Asks discussion, Nintendo president and HAL Laboratory alum Satoru Iwata revealed that HAL's name was intended as a riff on the American computer company IBM, who were omnipresent in the tech industry when HAL was founded in 1980. According to Iwata, the idea was that each of the letters in "HAL" were just before each of the letters in "IBM" in the Latin alphabet, thus conveying the fact that HAL were always "one step ahead of IBM."