One: 2

Could someone explain what the hell happened to video game titles? What the fuck is a “Horizon: Zero Dawn” or a “Bravely Default”? Or “Kingdom Hearts: 218/2 Days > Destiny Divide = Fart” or whatever. Do they leave this up to a random number generator? What is the reason for this? How does this get past all of the people in corporate and all of the people who are paid to make sure you don't have a stupid-sounding brand?

Another one: Games in a long-running franchise that have the exact same title as the first game in the series, so talking about it is prefaced with confusion.

“Hey, have you played Doom?” 

“Yeah, I remember that game when I was a kid.” 

“No, not DOOM Doom. The new Doom. The one that’s also called Doom but came out more recently than the other game that’s called Doom.” 

Sonic the Hedgehog. Tomb Raider. Thief. Mortal Kombat. That’s like if the next big JRPG were called “Final Fantasy 2″. People get paid millions of dollars to come up with names for these products, and everyone apparently forgot that subtitles are a thing?


You know what the new Spider-Man reboot is called? “Spider-Man: Homecoming”. See, they put another word in there to distinguish it from the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies, as a small courtesy to anyone who tries to talk about this shit. Especially in an age where word-of-mouth social media regurgitation-as-free advertising is so important.


This reminds me: there’s an old PSX-era EA game I played a demo of called “One”. And I always thought, man, what are they gonna call the sequel?

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~A.H.