Using Colons in Video Game Titles: What’s the Big Idea?
January 13th, 2009 | Written by Andrew Giese | Topic: Play
A quick poll of video games releasing in the near future turns up titles like The Lord of the Rings: Conquest, Cartoon Network Universe: FusionFall, Personal Trainer: Math, Star Ocean: Second Evolution, and The Chase: Felix Meets Felicity. And that’s just picking a handful from a three week period. What, pray-tell, do all these titles have in common? Is it that they’re a) all longer than they need to be, marked by prodigious use of the colon punctuation mark, or is it b) all of the above ? Why do developers and publishers insist on flooding the market with video games bearing titles and subtitles?
Silly question? Perhaps. But that’s what we do here at SmashPad. We ask the questions no one ever asks (nor particularly wants answered – ed.)
Let’s explore a couple possible reasons. Could it be that attaching a well-known franchise name with an otherwise obscure one validates it in the your eyes? If you saw a video game on store shelves with just “Conquest” prominently displayed on the cover, would you immediately walk by it without a second glance? Usually, but the word Conquest evokes so much imagery on its own that one gets to thinking about what kind of epic conquest one would face in a video game. Would you play as a maligned evil-doer reigning terror upon the lands, ultimately leading your undead army to victory against the forces of good so you can claim kingdom to all the lands? Or would you play an 18-year -old teen just beginning his sexual exploits?
These and other awesome, almost equally erotic, gaming fantasies would probably play out in your head before you even turned the cover over just to discover that you’ll be playing as a filth-covered soldier doing the grunt work for either good or evil in the context of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Ring series. So maybe one reason to place the franchise name before the actual title is to root out any intriguing mystery of what the game is about before you start using your imagination. How can this be a good thing? Sure, it costs a lot of money to get the license to use intellectual property as famous as LOTR, but does this mean you have to plaster it all over every single game made under that license?
Another reason to plaster a franchise name in front of the real title could stem from the fact that the game you’re looking at is really just a bumbled heap of loose code surrounded by blurry pixels and a control scheme dictated by quantum mechanics. In other words, the game sucks. The publisher recognized this, and in a last ditch effort to recoup development costs, tacked on the popular identifiable brand name so that your “hip” aunt would buy it for you on your birthday because she totally gets you and knows which brands kids today are rockin’.
Or maybe there’s a secret pissing contest between developers to see just how long they can get away with making a title before we catch on? Is it 20 characters? 25? 30? 50? “Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D’s Stardust Accelerator: World Championship 2009” for the Wii comes out to a whopping 60 characters including spaces, and that was just taken from the first page of ESRB’s list of games they’ve rated. IGN ran an article in March 2007 on a similar vein. Could we be witness to some mysterious Cult of the Colon that is secretly manipulating society by extending video game titles to aggravating lengths and NOT advocating for strange homosexual fetishes? Or, maybe more realistically, are we bearing witness to misguided brand managers who think that more franchise information appended to a title not only results in better sales, but also forces consumers to stare at a box just enough longer to realize “Hey, <brand name> really understands me and my unique rebellious tastes!”
Whatever the reasons are, blessedly brief titles like “Pokemon Red” have morphed into monstrosities like “Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Darkness”. Hopefully one day a chief marketing officer will stumble upon the groundbreaking conclusion that much can be said with a few choice words and removing the commercial brand from the title could be a good thing. It seems to have worked well for “The Dark Knight”.
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Comment by Danreb Victorio on the January 13th, 2009 at 10:54 pm
I know it’s a moot point, but Pokemon Red and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Darkness is not even a fair comparison. They aren’t even alike genres.
Sometimes subtitles make titles more interesting. Take Final Fantasy for instance. Nothing about the games yell anything about a “final fantasy.” Each and every one of those games could’ve had some sort of title.
Sometimes, it’s just required–look at The Legend of Zelda.
But your point does have some fruition to it, especially the one about Conquest.
I look at Super Mario Galaxy, probably the best game in 2007. If it wasn’t a Mario game, and it was simply called Galaxy, I think it would still be great. Then again, Mario’s presence in that game made it stellar.
Good piece though. It gets you thinking, even though it’s a silly question.