I always wondered why Gamecube was abbreviated as GCN (Gamecube Nintendo), instead of NGC (Nintendo Game Cube), but then I just found out that in Japan, it's abbreviated as NGC.
Why the change for North America? The N being at the end bothers me immensely...was NGC already taken?
NOA and NCL were apparently having heated debates about the naming of the GameCube. After the prototype name "Dolphin", NCL decided to call it the "StarCube" (becuase it was almost a cube) but then NOA told NCL that the name was uncool and that it wouldn't fly in America, so they tried again and settled on GameCube.
NCL (possibly Iwata, with his growing-but-incomplete power) decided that Nintendo should stop using the "Nintendo" brand because it was starting to pick up baggage and weigh Nintendo down, and even if it wasn't an anchor yet, they were going to wear it out by abusing it, so "Game___" should become a company-wide brand, since they were already building that with GameBoy, and it was really strong with no signs of wearing out.
NOA liked "GameCube", so they took out a trademark on "NGC". There were already a number of other "NGC's", but none of them were in competing fields. Neo Geo had no claim on NGC. If you're don't get into fights with each other, multiple parties are allowed to trademark the same acronym. The only reason the World Wildlife Fund and World Wresting Federation couldn't coexist was because they got into a fight over who should be allowed to have wwf.com.
But then NCL protested that it should be
just GameCube, not
Nintendo GameCube. They should drop the "N" from "NGC". NOA thought the idea of abandoning the "Nintendo" brand was crazy, so they fought that idea, and eventually came to the compromise of "de-emphasizing" the "N" by moving it to the back of the line, and it became "GCN". It does mean GameCube Nintendo. Embrace it's awesomeness. NOA willingly allowed their trademark on "NGC" to expire. It's dead now, but it was alive when people first started asking about this stuff.
After everything was settled, NCL apparently decided that "NGC" was just fine, and they kind of liked it, so they went with that (possibly due to Iwata's incomplete power).
After GameCube failed to expand "Game___" into a reliable brand for consoles, Iwata successfully dropped the "Nintendo" brand for consoles and replaced it with "Wii", and also indirectly dropped "Game___" for handhelds too, because the GameBoy brand was considered too strong to risk attaching to the DS.