How does a game get its name?
That’s the question No More Robots founder (and onetime Gamasutra staffer) Mike Rose posed on Twitter today, and the responses he got are worth reading if you’re at all curious about how much (or how little) work goes into naming games like 80 Days, Rock Band, DayZ, and more.
Luckily, Rose was thoughtful enough to make a Moment out of the whole thread, which we’ve taken the liberty of embedding below for easy reading.
It’s fun to compare this list with the weird trivia, posited earler this year, that (based on surveys of Steam data) game names are actually getting shorter over time.
Devs hungry for more bite-sized bits of game industry insight might also enjoy this Twitter-sourced story from 2014 about the different ways people talk about “beating” games around the world, or the more recent Twitter thread of game devs sharing the hidden mechanics that make their games stand out.
How game developers name their games