This Was The Generation Of Increasingly Silly Game Names

This Was The Generation Of Increasingly Silly Game Names

Look, video game names have always been a little silly. And likely always will be. But this past console generation saw the emergence of a new kind of silly, one that graduated from “harmless fun” to “facepalm”.

I’m talking about the concept of taking standard naming conventions and throwing them out the window. I’m talking miscapitalised titles. Game names with numbers replacing letters. Games with acronyms that aren’t really acronyms, they’re just ways of getting around trademarks. And other crimes against not only grammar, but common human decency.

This Was The Generation Of Increasingly Silly Game Names

Here is a hall of shame. Not of games with bad names. Tales of Graces F and Warface, you have silly names, but you at least used capital letters correctly. The games below did not. They are the shameful ones. Shame!

DiRT – Dirt. It’s Dirt.

inFAMOUS – So he was…inFAMOUS? Unfamous?

F.E.A.R. – Nice try, guys. First Encounter Assault Recon. Rolls off the tongue.

F.3.A.RReally?

THI4F – The original title for the Thief reboot. So bad that even the studio realised it needed to be changed, later dialling it back to just “Thief”.

RAGE – Didn’t need the all-caps, id. Wasn’t really a game to shout about. OK, that was mean. I quite liked it! But still. Rage would have been just fine.

M.A.G. – OK, so this – which stood for “Massive Action Game” – doesn’t technically count, since that’s a proper acronym. But it was such a stupid name I’m putting it here anyway.

WATCH_DOGS – Like Thief, it debuted during the current generation and is destined for current-gen hardware, so it counts. Caps and an underscore? Oh my.

SPLIT/SECOND – That’s not what a forward slash is for.

This Was The Generation Of Increasingly Silly Game Names

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