Inside the NAME FACTORY

Inside the NAME FACTORY

All these screwball names must be pretty hard to come up with, right? Of course not! Getting paid for gurgling seems to be one of the legitimate thrills around the old vid-game farm.

Jack Hubka of Gottlieb explains: "It's really pretty simple—we get about 30 people standing around and we bounce things off each other." Like what, nerf joysticks? Oh no, names. Gottlieb has one of the great gibberish names in Q*Bert, but Hubka is modest about the origins of the strange syllables. In fact he can hardly remember. "There was some discussion on how to spell it," he recalls. C'mon, Jack, isn't that "i-t?" Yuk, yuk. Well, in any case, more straightforward competition like Cubert was quashed.

Keith Egging over at Taito elaborates, stressing that names can come from anywhere, and usually do. "A lot of times the programmer will have the name (before he invents the game). We're presently doing one called Toasters And Chainsaws, and the game evolved from that name."

I should hope so. Gosh, it almost sounds like love and marriage, huh? Despite the fun, though, there is a moribund side to the Name Game.

"There's a lot of legal procedures involved," Egging says. "Once we have a name that seems to be conducive to the game, we have to do a patent and trademark search to see if there's other games that have the same name, or if it's been used on something else." Hmm, he must be talking about Toasters And Chainsaws Goat Chow. Searches of this type can take up to two years, so you can see the vid-makers take these things seriously.

Once a game's ready to start swallowing quarters, the manufacturers take a long last look at the name, just in case playing something called Frzzzp makes people feel like leaving their lunch on the screen. "We have a group of test arcades.. .and some of the questions that we ask people are: what does the name invoke? Does the name tell you anything? Does the name incite you to play? Should we change it to something else? What do you suggest that new name should be? Could you read the logo? Did you understand the lettering? Things like that," Egging says. Whew. And I thought / was taking this thing too seriously. Understand the lettering??

Does all this consumer output amount to weighty influence on the final monicker? You betcha.. .according to Egging, at least half their names have been changed because of public response. One such name is Front Line, which -in its debut form—was called Big Combat. That was the literal translation from the Japanese, but the American Taito group felt it was "too aggressive." They changed it to Blitz, but the trademark search ixnayed that, which led 'em to Front Line. Heck, I like Big Combat myself.

(A similar translation fuddle led to the spectacularly-named Donkey Kong, as well. Nintendo, the manufacturers, marketed the beast in Japan as Krazy Kong. The Japanese word for "krazy"...I mean, "crazy" is "baka." However, the same idiogram in Japanese can also mean "horse" or "ass." How in the hell are these people wiping us out with such a screwy language, anyway?)

Well, do the Namers ever feel a little bit like lunatics dreaming this stuff up? "Oh, yeah. Definitely!" enthuses the redoubtable Mr. Egging. He tells the story of one such free spirit: "The man that developed Qix—that game, no matter what the game was, he was gonna call it Qix. He wanted to start a new word where V doesn't follow 'q.' and that was his reasoning." And that's something I can't qik about.