Let's just be glad video games aren't named like manga/anime are and we have "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild" instead of "I slept for 100 years after the world was destroyed and now have to face the demon king".
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2026
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my favorite game growing up was, "Italian plumbers take too many mushrooms and go on a rampage through the kingdom to save the princess from the evil turtle"
although a close second was, "I am trapped in a dark maze with drugs and now there are ghosts chasing me?!?"
Currently playing "That Time I Was Stranded in a Dark Fantasy World With No Quest Markers, Had to Defeat Every Boss By Dying and Reviving Hundreds of Times to Level Up, and Became the Old Lord of the Ring by Accident"
A distinctive name only helps if people can remember its spelling. I'd rather have a short, searchable title than another pair of generic fantasy words.
FALL.
There was an earlier era, when hadn't been already taken.
Yep, roguelikes are roguelikes, because there was literally a game called "Rogue" way back in 1980: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game)
Empirefall
Rise of the
Shadow of the
Tomb Raider did both of them.
Wth your example in the post "Horizon: Zero Dawn should have just been called Zero Dawn", how would it be more memorable? Horizon is a catch word to have with all their games in the series, for easier recognition with later releases. It makes perfect sense for a game series that is planned to be like this, and perfectly memorable.
The game quality makes names memorable, not the other way around.
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(17 replies)
AUTUMNFALL
FALLFALL.
$ git clone -q https://github.com/karlforshaw/opengamedb.git
$ cd opengamedb/
$ cut -d, -f1 names.csv |xargs -i% cat %.csv|cut -d, -f1|sort|uniq|sed 's/^"//'|sed 's/"$//'|grep -E '^(.*)\1+$'|uniq
[snip]
***
1010
101010
222
999
Ape QuestApe Quest
BeatBeat
DingDingDing
GUNGUNGUN
JUJU
KARAKARA
MochiMochi
MokMok
niconico
OlliOlli
QbQbQb
ROCKETSROCKETSROCKETS
ROWROW
RRRR
RUNRUNRUN
TripTrip
VVVVV
VVVVVV
YamaYama
zzzzz
$
There do appear to be games like that (though "Ape QuestApe Quest" appears to be a typo).
That's the gritty, mid-2010's reboot that was just called "Ape Quest"
This is the one that grinds my gears.
I have an ongoing joke for these games in my friend discord where anytime one comes up (because there’s always one in a gaming showcase) I put
“fall, yet another game in the long running -fall series.”
My headcanon is that they all are in the same universe.
Ok but Titanfall gets a pass.
"Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines" would like to have a word.
I gotta be honest though. Neither of those names strike as particularly bad. JRPGs are way worse (not even mentioning mobile games).
I asked GameDiscoverCo founder Simon Carless
Talking about names, that is a very Unamerican family name.
I strongly suspect that the surname predates the automobile.
searches
https://www.familysearch.org/en/surname?surname=carless
Carless Name Meaning
English (Staffordshire): variant of Corliss .
Carless is most likely found in:
England: 1,769 people in Family Tree
United States: 141 people in Family Tree
Australia: 56 people in Family Tree
I strongly suspect that the surname predates the automobile.
It was obviously "Cartless" in older times.
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Because now you can build it into a franchise. Intergalactic: <INSERT_TITLE>
Yeah, but Flynn's suggestion (and I'd very much agree) is to save that for the sequel. You'll get a much more memorable title for your first entry, and then you can market off of that. If I might retroactively ruin a few other series that way:
- Half-Life: Mysteries of the G-Man
- Ghost: Tsushima
- BioShock: Fall of Rapture
- Diablo: The Battle of Hell
- PUBG: Battlegrounds...wait a minute...
Player Unknown's Battlegrounds Battlegrounds is such a weird case. The name was stupid to begin with, everyone ended up just calling it PUBG. Then they rebranded to PUBG being the company name and the game name, but then slapped Battlegrounds back on the end anyway?!
Pokemon also started out as Pocket Monsters in the original Japanese release. When it came to release outside Japan, there was trademark issues and they had to find an alternative name... ended up with Pokemon. Later they rebranded the game in Japan too. Someone correct me if I'm wrong here.
Japanese loves abbreviating english loan words to two syllables (see also: remote control -> remokon, personal computer -> pasokon), so I'd suspect it was called pokemon colloquially very early and then the international branding caused it to become official.
Wikipedia seems to agree but i didn't check sources
The original games name was Pocket Monsters, but the community just abbreviated it to "Pokemon", because Pocket Monsters isn't a word they can pronounce correctly. But it wasn't the part of the name at all. You can check the game title, cartridge image and packaging. In a later international release because of the trademark issues they just used the shorter name instead.
I think to this day the games are named "Pocket Monsters" in Japan, but with "Pokemon" added in front. But I'm actually not sure about this. One source to look for are game box-art covers: https://pokemondungeon.com/media-downloads/box-art and on https://archives.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Category:Game_covers
- Pokemon Blue (Game Boy, Japanese)
- Pokemon Ruby (Game Boy Advance, Japanese)
- Pokemon Sun (Nintendo 3DS, Japanese)
But in newer games (I don't know since when) they seem to have dropped the "Pocket Monsters" part from the actual game name entirely:
Here to correct as requested: it's Pokémon. You're welcome!
It’s ポケモン
I'd rather have numbered titles in the series so that I don't have to memorize the order.
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Horizon : Zero Dawn is a terrible title. Zero Dawn is only marginally better.
Duskfade is a perfectly pleasant 3D platformer with Kingdom Hearts-style combat that came out a couple of months ago. Once I've finished typing this paragraph, however, it will once again erase itself from my memory, because there's nothing evocative about the name.
I feel that says more about the game than the name. Like I find (scrolls through Steam library) Bullet Witch is a more memorable name than say Portal, but I can tell you a hell of a lot more about the latter.
"Beyond that—I actually think that naming isn't that important, since most people buy a game based on video footage, someone else playing it, or a recommendation. And we've seen in music and elsewhere that weird names are in no way a blocker to becoming successful." Carless cites Steely Dan and Bananarama as examples.
Do people really look at the videos on Steam? I always immediately click past them to look at the images.
Failbetter's next game is called Mandrake—the result of lots of collaborative longlisting, Flynn says. As well as encapsulating horticultural and sorcerer-type themes, it's the name of the game's main character.
This would be like if Esoteric Ebb called itself 'Cleric', though given Wizards of the Coast is publishing a game called 'Warlock: Dungeon & Dragons' I suppose it wouldn't be that out there.
Good article though.
Do people really look at the videos on Steam? I always immediately click past them to look at the images.
I watch them for any gameplay footage.
I disagree that bullet witch is more memorable than portal although bias and the fallacy of trying to remember unmemorable games is making it very hard to tell if that would still be true with other titles. My instinct is that uncommon, distinct words (Portal, Watchtower, Celeste) are more memorable than combinations of words that compete against each other rather than forming a whole (Bullet Witch, Star Fox, Crash Bandicoot: Twinsanity). Although now that I do have examples... I have no idea, honestly it doesn't seem super correlated.
Yeah, I'm not sure either tbh. I can think of quite a few things that make a name forgettable (eg noun of proper noun), but I can't think of anything that would make a name memorable other than it just being memorable.
Just as an aside, but I will push back on portal being an uncommon word. It's more common than chess.
I browse the Steam Store images-first, like you do. I would guess that is a generational habit, though and anyone older or younger probably favors the gameplay videos over looking at screenshots because they weren't conditioned by the early Internet days where watching any video online was a serious commitment
Wild Hearts and Sayonara Wild Hearts are not in the same series. Tales of Zau is not a part of the Tales of Series. Just look at how many games are Z something or something Z.
Why bother with reinventing the title wheel when you can just hope that you'll have a subset of buyers that purchase expecting a different level of quality?
The Outer Worlds & Outer Wilds are pretty hard for me to differentiate.
Yeah this one gets me
What throws me on Wild Hearts is they also have a stylized W icon that screams Witcher to me. It always throws me off.
Duskbloods is the new FromSoftware game, so there's no chance anyone will forget that.
Oof, I had already forgotten it before they mentioned FromSoftware. It sounds like a teenage vampire drama...
Horizon: Zero Dawn should have just been called Zero Dawn.
It should have been "Horizon." That's the game's series title. And since it was the first one, it didn't need a subtitle at all.
Also, in the first paragraph it seems like the author is confused by words that are just a bit similar and not even the same since they are mixing together games with "dusk" in the title and games with "dust" in the title.
Zero Dawn was a thing in the game's back story that explained how everything came to be. Horizon was a throwaway word in a monologue toward the end of the game, and they probably also risked brand trouble with Forza: Horizon, which predated it. That's my case anyway. "Horizon" seemed a bad fit for that game's title.
Fair. And also, naming things is hard. I am numb to it by now; video games have always tended to have goofy, nonsense, or boring names. Tho, back in the day, we just assumed it was a translation thing considering a vast majority of the popular games in my youth were made by Japanese developers.
"Metal Gear Solid, huh? That's certainly a name."
Kojima really is a gift to modern gaming with his naming conventions
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