What’s in a Name?
July 17th, 2007If you’ve played any amount of video games in your lifetime, you probably know first-hand that some of them have some pretty weird titles, especially the old ones. Which got me to thinking: “I wonder if there’s any pattern to it?” That is, are there any interesting patterns in old video game names?
I collected data for six (mostly older) systems. They are:
- Gameboy and Gameboy Color (GB)
- Gameboy Advance (GBA)
- Genesis
- Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)
- Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES)
- Turbo Graphix 16 (TG16)
This is what I found:
(”Title Count” is the number of U.S. releases “Best Sellers” is based on this Wikipedia page, which only includes games which sold over a million copies. Sonic & Knuckles was omitted because I did not consider any games with special characters in the title due to data processing issues.
A few things pop out immediately from the data. First, video game names have been getting marginally longer over time. (Word inflation?) Second, name length of games for the same system are closer to each other, compared to games for other systems. Third, the average length in words for games on any system is three. Did adding “Super” to Mario Brothers put that game over the top? Probably not, but I bet you’ve never heard that reason before.
Lastly, best selling games have a full one word more in their title than the average game. Is this why video game names seem to be getting longer over time? It’s an absurd idea but fun to think about. I can just imagine frustrated developers of yet another new (but uninspired) platformer tossing around ideas to make their game sell. After hours of debating innovative gameplay concepts, pricing points, and pre-order bonuses, one of them jumps up and blurts out, “Just make the title longer!” with his finger waggling in the air.
Well, maybe not. My theory is that successful games tend to run in series, driving up the title length, as do games in general. It’s just that successful games are even more likely to be sequels and thus have longer titles. (For proof of this, check out that Wikipedia page I linked to earlier.)
So, enough about the amount of words. What kind of weird words come up in video game titles again and again?
Any guesses?
Here is a sample of frequently used words in NES games, and words used across all 6 systems:
(If you want to see what popular words were for other systems, check this link out.)
Let me first explain the difference between the filtered and unfiltered list. Words taken out of the filtered list are: a, and, for, in, of, on, the, to. Most of those words are fairly common but don’t add lot to our understanding of video game names. The one unfiltered list is here for reference.
Each word list has a few basic similarities. At a glance you can see how popular sequels are. The top words for almost every system are “2″ and “3″ and even “II”. Sports words are also overrepresented. Sports games, unsurprisingly, have always been popular. (Many of the first video games had tennis and hockey themes.) It’s no different today, where Electronic Arts rides on the back of one of their best sellers, Madden NFL.
The rest of the top words used in titles are more eccentric. “Super” is a big word, for example (no pun intended). This is probably because of the mostly older systems I chose. In fact, the number one word used in Super Nintendo titles is “super”. Some old school gamers reading this are probably nodding their heads in recognition. Back then it seemed like every SNES game had the word “super” in the title, just in case you forgot which console you were playing.
More familiar words are stuff like “adventure”, “adventures”, “world”, “dragon”, “quest”, and the ever-popular “ninja” (who knew?). Each system has their own idiosyncrasies, of course (i.e. “advance”), but there seems to be a fairly large pool of words that systems share. If you need some ideas for what to name your next game, those would probably be a good place to start.
Then again, if you want your game to be distinctive, choose a one word title. All of the top words used in titles are component words, useless on their own. And you can buck the possible trend of longer game names at the same time. As long as you don’t pick something terrible like Catechumen or Wargasm, you should be OK. (Note: I don’t agree with every game mentioned by that link.)
If you’re still stumped for a name for your video game, why not try The Video Game Name Generator? (My twin brother, Ed, made it years ago.) It conveniently generates a lot of names in the ever-popular three word format, though it often gives longer names. I don’t know about you, but “Japanese Pogo Gladiator” (the last name I generated) sounds like a great game to me! (Note: Some of the names may not be work safe.)
(If you’d like to play with the data yourself, here it is in Excel or CSV format. You can check out some stuff I didn’t include, like how popular words in best-selling games are and lesser used popular words for each system.)
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October 5th, 2007 at 8:17 am
Wow, this is one aspect of video games that I’ve never given any serious thought to before, outside of maybe the “Super” thing. It’s kind of interesting to look back at the NES and see words like “kid” (seems to have been replaced by “man” over the years, appropriately enough), “double”, and “master”, which aren’t at all common anymore. Then there’s odd stuff like “Tecmo” (which persisted well into the company’s PlayStation years!) and the silly contraction “‘n” that you’d never realize was so prevalent until it’s pointed out like this. Good show!
Danny, thanks again for taking the time out to read my blog. And yeah, there are some funny trends in there over the years. I just wish I could get datasets on more recent systems. It would be fun to see how things are currently. Any ideas?
- Dave
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