Anyone who has been in the difficult situation of choose name for your son, and you have seen how strongly your partner rejects names like John Connor or Gohan, you know how difficult it is to sit down and find the right name. And since naming your progeny is complicated in all areas, that of video games does not escape either.
For example, what happened to the creators of Destiny many years before Sony bought Bungie. The story of how the popular studio was pulling their hair out until they found the perfect name for what would later be his star franchise: Halo.
Good hand for shots, bad for names
We are in Chicago, the year is 1997 and among the 15 employees who have Bungie in their offices, two of them have started working on what could become their next game.
While the rest move on with the sequel to Myth: The Fallen Lords, designer Marcus Lehto and studio co-founder Jason Jones start tinkering with another game of real time strategy. The big difference with respect to the fantasy game is that this time they would look to the future, to a strategy in which the 3D terrain was part of the gameplay and the vehicles moved through it realistically.
That first idea would continue to evolve until it became the game of Master Chief that we all know, and when the team was clear that that soldier in shining armor would be the great protagonist of the story, a name fell like a slab on the game. Would be called Armor -by armor, in English-.
The first step when you have a problem is to recognize it, and in Bungie they were well aware that their thing with names had no future. Is there really a duller name than Armor? Well, considering that the studio came from calling their previous games marathon Y mythIt is not a strange decision either.
monkey eggs
Aware that the name had to be changed so that people would take them seriously, they decided to take solipses, as they called the planet on which the action took place, as the title for the project. But someone must have thoughtSolipsis… Are we really going to call it Solipsis?”, and the wheel began to turn again.
As development progressed, names came and went in the hope that someone would end up prevailing. They went from Resonance to Flare. From Red-Shift to Hostile Environment. From K3 to Provocation. And they were followed by others like Free Fall, Chaos, Visionary, Island One, Hard Vacuum, Starshield, Star Maker, Age of Aquarius, The Crystal Palace, The Santa Machine…
“Like what The Santa Machine? Who the hell came up with that?“, someone in the office must have blurted out. And tired of how that was closer to becoming a joke than a sincere attempt to find a name, they decided embrace the joke to the extreme to force yourself to find the perfect title.
And until that happened they would call him Monkey Nuts. Or what is the same, Peanuts. Or what is the same if you also want to fully grasp the joke, Monkey Eggs. Yes, you should take a look at Google images to understand the reference.
From Blam! to halo
Shortly after the decision was made, Jason Jones himself changed his name again because, according to his wordsShe couldn’t tell her mother that she worked at something everyone called Monkey Eggs. What name did you choose? Blam!
It seems that the busy street that the windows of that small Chicago office faced was an inexhaustible source of car crashes. They weren’t serious accidents, but every few minutes you could hear wheels screeching as if they were the prelude to a great crash and, in the silence that followed, waiting to see if they really ended up colliding or not, the artist Robert McLees shouted “Blam!“. He said in order to convey a certain sense of conclusion.
As the game progressed, the team became concerned that they couldn’t find a name, so they hired an agency to do the work for them to prevent the game from being called Blam!. Unfortunately for the studio, the name they chose was Covenant and, as anyone who has come this far will have imagined, the name was not liked either.
When the planet Solipsis became the Halo interplanetary we all know, set designer Paul Russel commented that it would be a good idea to use that as a teaser. Despite the fear that it would be less aggressive as a name for an action game, Halo It ended up liking everyone and establishing itself as the official title for the project. The rest, as they say, is history.