Viper Citations

[elfolampo]

The Viper series is ripe with citations, starting from its name, and the name of specific games, that all come from cars.

There is, of course, the content of the games themselves, like Angel Dust very obviously spoofing Dirty Pair. A lot of games are like that actually, with the absurdity taken up to eleven.

I feel, however, that some even pretty direct citations might be lost the general public, like many in RSR, a game that seems to have a deep italian theme:
Alitalia is the name of the national italian air travel company
Alfa, while possibly being a reference to the first letter of the Greek alphabet, is probably a reference to Alfa Romeo.
Julietta is probably a reference to Alfa Romeo's Giulietta car, and it's also the name of the infamous girl protagonist of Romeo and Juliet, that takes place in Italy.
Diablo is one of the most famous Lamborghini models. It also means devil, which is appropriate for the character.
Jota is the name of a one-of-a-kind special version of the Lamborghini Miura SV(this is pretty obscure, so it might be a coincidence).
Maranello is the name of Ferrari's base town.
Veloce is the italian adjective meaning 'fast'. It also appears as part of the name of several car models.
Cala probably gets her name from the Lamborghini Calà prototype model.
Elan is probably a reference to the Lotus Elan, but he doesn't seem to fit with the general theme, even if Elans could be fitted with Lamborghini style doors.

Speaking of a completely different game, Magical Gambler ToToCal Cyomi also holds a citation that is very easy to miss(especially nowadays). Back in the 90's and earlier, "Totocalcio" was probably the most popular form of sports gambling in Italy. Basically, every week 13(now 14) top league football(soccer) matches would be chosen, and people could bet on the outcome of all 13, in a 1X2 format. Prizes would be assigned based on the number of people who guessed 12 or 13 matches right. It still exists nowadays, but it's incredibly less popular. Given the pretty long, complicated name, and the theme of Cyomi, I doubt this is a coincidence, and I hope this sheds a bit of light on the name of this specific heroine.

That said, I propose we pool all the useless trivia stuff we know about the innumerable citations in Viper here.

[JG]

This is fantastic stuff.  I'm going to lift some of it for use on SDM's character bios.

Some of it is well known (Alfa, Veloce, Maranello), but some of it even I didn't know (Jota and Totocalcio)

I thought Jota was named after the Greek letter Iota, to complement Alfa.  The car naming is more in tune with the VIPER series legacy.

And I knew ToToCaL had to have something to do with gambling, but I could never find a Japanese word that matched up to anything like "totokaru" and web searches never got me a hit becuase totocal is an incomplete word, missing the -cio ending.)  Thanks a ton for finally shedding light on this one.

[Rai]

There are probably a lot more references to Italian auto culture in the series, it would make sense. It's tricky when you're a native english speaker looking for references that are foreign to a foreign game. It's just that extra degree of separation. Sometimes it helps to plug the Japanese spelling of the words into a search engine and hope it comes up with a Japanese article about that non-Japanese concept, but more often than not it's too obscure. I used to search for references like this all the time for other games. I like it when someone else has that information ready to go.

As for other obscure references, only one I can think of offhand is how the "The Mayworks" is named for "meiwaku", Japanese for "annoyance", a word that comes up in the game script, and fits with its theme.

The car references in the names of Carerra, Mercedes, Rati, and Alpina probably don't need to be mentioned. I think it was HG that pointed out Rati is short for Maserati.