I do remember there being some pretty bad cat puns that we all wish we could unhear,” Marco Bombasi tells me. He s the localisation director for Monster Hunter: World, the man in charge of translating the dinosaur-harvesting game from its original Japanese into other languages, including English. Every player in Monster Hunter gets a cat sidekick who says things like Hello Meow-ster , so I ve asked Bombasi if writing the game’s ubiquitous cat punnage ever produced wordplay so heinous it managed to give the team paws for thought. He says yes, it got bad.
So bad, in fact, that our editor and resident cat pun professional, David, had to write a rulebook on acceptable usage.