This is an urban legend. They were originally going to title the game “Fighting Fantasy,” but they couldn’t due to the Steve Jackson fantasy game book series having that name already. They liked the “Fi Fa” sound, so they came up with “Final” for the alliteration and because it sounded cool.

There are so many things like this. Billionaires (or even multimillionaires) could create an endowment to fund operations for museums like this until the end of time. It was already running on a smaller budget, perhaps $1M or so per year. Even a $20M endowment would probably be enough to sustain it forever. With $30M they could probably afford to expand it a bit. One wonders why Allen didn’t set up a trust to do exactly that while he was alive.

I visited the LCM multiple times, and was amazed at how everything was working and interactive. I think it would have been a natural evolution to split the space for early video game consoles as well, perhaps up through the PS1. That might have brought in more (and younger) visitors.

They might just want key staff to stay off recruiters’ radar before development is complete. Doing a high-profile project with Nintendo will probably raise the profile of their studio quite a bit.