LeFish French people used to call the NES “la Nintendo”, and the Master System either “la Master System” or “la Sega”. Life was easy. It’s the next generation that made things confusing.
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System was advertised as “la Super Nintendo”, so that’s pretty much what it was. But it retroactively forced people to describe “la Nintendo” more specifically, and as always we just copied the British and it became “la NES” (pronounced Ness’). No French person in their right mind would spell out the letters of an acronym if it was possible to say it as a word.
A weirder thing I had completely forgotten until now is that, with the boom of import gaming circa 1990, it became necessary to differentiate consoles per regions and somehow SFC / SNES / SNIN became a trendy way to differentiate games per region for the console. SFC pronounced ess eff cé. SNES pronounced ess’ness. SNIN pronounced ess’neen. That’s embarrassing in retrospect…
I already shared the PC Engine / vagina thing earlier. Here is a similar misreading. French people are never sure if we are supposed to read a G soft or hard in English. The rule in French is G before E is always soft (so like a “J” sound). And so, many people still mistakenly call it the Game Jear.
One huge issue for French is the necessity to gender all words, like in most most latin-derived languages. For a while all consoles were given a feminine gender (“console” itself is feminine), and all computers were given a masculine gender (local term “ordinateur” is masculine). So, Mega Drive is feminine, but Amiga is masculine (despite the actual meaning of amiga in spanish…).
But then, Nintendo France decided to advertise the Game Boy as le Game Boy. Apparently because Sony’s Walkman was masculine and they wanted to “bandwagon” on the popularity of the Walkman. This became a source of conflict in gaming circles. But it seemed like a one-off.
Then Nintendo France did it again with le Gamecube. Makes sense, it’s a cube (which is masculine). But no other stationary gaming console has ever been masculine before or since. To this day, there will still be arguments online between people saying le Gamecube vs people saying la Gamecube. It’s the Pineapple on Pizza of gaming arguments in France.