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The 50 Worst Videogame Names of All Time
Game Revolution has a great feature looking at fifty of the worst-named games ever to require a controller. They dig deep here, unearthing gems like 'Yo! Noid!', 'Awesome Possum Kicks Dr. Machino's Butt!', and 'Huygen's Disclosure'. From the article: "From Dick Butkus to Hootie and the Blowfish to Lake Titicaca, bad names have been with us forever. But thanks to the inevitable collision of reclusive nerds, bizarre artists and painfully unhip marketing execs, the video game industry enjoys some of the worst names of all. The following list was compiled after hours of lively debate, pages of exhausting science and one actual geek fistfight."
Wii should be there
...NEEEERDDDS!
But anyway: Cotton Fantastic Night Dreams
Was Donkey Kong on the list? Couldn't load the page. Wasn't it supposed to be Monkey Kong?
I remember Princess Tomato!
Dumb name aside, it was an awesome game.
If I go through my B-Movie collection, one thing's for sure: They could have redone it all with essentially the same crap setup and added "IN 3D"
No wait, MS just did with XP and Vista...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
..."Dominion: Storm over Gift 3" by Ion Storm.
{{ Ummm.... }} {{ English }} {{ Do you have it? }}
"I'm an old-fashioned type of guy. I worship the Sun and Moon as gods. And fear them."
Wild Woody huh... Could've been worse, they could have had a sequel. "Wild Woody meets Mad Pussy" or something
Infiltrated dot Net
I got sticky balls on the first day.
Awesome Possum was pretty cool. I remember playing it when I was six or seven...and annoying the hell out of whomever was in the room with me by turning "motor mouth" on.
How can that game not be on there?? I call shenanigans on this list.
It's dated today, but I could swear I "Stumbled" upon this yesterday evening.
#47 - Jumpman. Was there really a better name for it?
Prove it.
Hehe, I actually liked that game for some mysterious reason. Now, to find a 100% legal venue to recover the game and bask in nostalgia... *shifty eyes*
Shaq-Fu for the SNES was by all time accounts the worst videogame name ever. I ate it up. Ah, Youth's indescretions.
War isn't about who's right. It's about who's left.
This list of 50 badly named games doesn't even have XPlay's "worst named game" Tube Slider or even my perennial favorite Spawn In The Demon's Hand. Not even a mention of Capcom's "Street Fighter" sequelitis with "Super Street Fighter II Turbo" or "Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha".
Speaking of sequels, there are games like "Mega Man X" (right after MM6) and "Wizards and Warriors X" (sequel to W&W2, I believe) that just confuse people as to what game they are playing. Hey, what's all this "Super Castlevania IV" about? Is it better than regular old "Castlevania IV"?
Gah, now I need to make my own list.
I don't think "Wargasm" and "If It Moves, Shoot It" are names that should be on the list (they're bad, but not top 50 bad). Surely these games didn't expect to set any sales records, and you certainly know what you're getting with these titles.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. - Woody Allen
Was that supposed to be some kind of word play on Lemmy?
Lake Titicaca! Lake Titicaca!
Why do we sing of its fame?
Lake Titicaca! Lake Titicaca!
'Cause we really like saying its name!
Surprised it didn't make the cut.
Check out the cave on the east side of lake Hylia. Strange and wonderful things live in it.
#47 = Jumpman.
I loved this game, it was absolutely one of my favorite games on the Atari 400. It was like a pre-super-mario bro's, complete with fast action, many many many levels with all kinds of variation in the enemies you encounter etc.
Not only did I play it alot, my whole family did. We had 300 to 400 games for the Atari 400, and this was one of my favorites.... I can think of ALOT worse games than this that arn't even on this top 50.
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
It only exists in my mind right now but it'll be awesome. Trust me on this, it's gonna be a pacman for the 21st century.
Everytime I hear the name Lake Titicaca, I can't help but think of the song and be reminded that its located between Bolivia and Peru.
:(
Yakko's "Nations of the World" song is worse due to the fact that some of the countries no longer exist. Unfortunately the song in my brain remains the same.
How is Skidmarks (plan-view racer on the Amiga) not on there? That's got to be /the/ worst videogame name of all time, bar none!
Oh no... it's the future.
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial?
Holy crap was this a game bad. So, so bad. I wanted to beat my friend for making me spend 5 minutes playing this game. I cannot believe that they didn't put it on the list Gamerankings.com Wikipedia
"Armed forces abroad are of little value unless there is prudent counsel at home" - Cicero
Yes, the game was actually called Linkle Liver Story.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkle_Liver_Story
...tend to consist of randomly thrown-together English words as it is.
wot, no Cock'n??
Floppy missed the list... come on, that definitely is a suggestive name for a game. Of course, Irritating Stick's cover art is classic! That just hurts to even look at.
stuff |
... ZeroWing, because it obviously would have sold more if they named it All Your Base Are Belong To Us.
We are talking about worst game NAMES, not worst GAMES. Though if you're only creative enough to add on the system's name to whatever it is you're making...
It was on Digg last week.
I'm partial to the video game "King and Balloon" because of the juxtaposition of two such unrelated nouns.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Aside from the fact they use "retarded" in their description, Gamespot actually gives this an '8.6 Great' rating. http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/divinedivinity/ind
So, who am U supposed to believe? How will I ever know if the game is any good? Do all angels have nice boobs?
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Though I am not sure it can be called a "game"
...But I digress. TREMBLE PUNY HUMANS!ONE DAY MY SPECIES WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
The number one worst named game on the list is based on a real Japanes gameshow where contestants carry a metal rod through a maze with electrified walls, where the walls are only slightly wider than the stick.
I love the Japanese!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
"Nations of the World" also names regions that have not been nations ever and, as I recall, even a city or two.
Chris Mattern
Oh, and who could forget the classic Street Fighter:The Movie:The Game? I mean, it was a game about a movie that was based on a game. Has that ever been done before? Movies based on arcade games almost universally suck. And video games based on movies also suck. But a video game based on a movie based on an arcade game? That approaches a level of suckitude that almost cannot be measured. Oh, and getting back on topic: The name sucked too.
The absolute worst game ever is Pong. Even the name is stupid - as bad as calling a game Stink or Smell. It's meant to be some kind of tennis game. I daren't actually call it tennis though - the rules are completely wrong and there's no attempt to simulate the net. The rendering is stupendously bad - the ball isn't even round, it's a white square! And the bats or rackets are merely white rectangles. Even the scores are written with blocky text.
The controls are about as primitive as you can get - usually a rotary controller that allows you to move your racket up or down in one dimension. The sound effects have to be heard to be believed - they are merely beeps each time a ball is hit. No attempt at any kind of simulation. The physics is completely trivial. There is almost no opportunity for the exercise of any kind of skill.
Of course Pong will have its apologists. People who will say it's as good as the technology allowed it to be. Sure, it was good for its day (which isn't saying much, there was no competition at the time so no motivation to actually do anything good), but objectively it was the worst game ever made. It sold purely because nobody had seen any video game before, not because it had any inherently good qualities. Some engineer scraped together the bare minimum device that could be called a 'game' given the technology that was available. And believe me, it truly is the bare minimum of a game. The graphics make the rendering in every single game in the bottom 50 list look like the best painting of the Renaissance. Pointing a flashlight at a wall and making the spot of light go up and down probably has as much right to be called a video game and it's about as much fun.
And just in case you're too young to have played this game on a console, you can play it online here. I think you'll see I haven't exaggerated one bit.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
When the game doesn't involve any playing, they call it an "interactive novel."
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
It's "Worst Videogame Names", not just "Worst Videogames".
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
TFA is about the worst videogame names ever, not the worst games ever.
There is MM7, 8 and 9, they just didn't happen to come to the US. I believe the Japanese nameis Rockman, not Megaman, but still.
You can see the same thing with Final Fantasy: 1, 2, 3, 7. WTF? Well there really were 6 before 7. 1 was a dual release, 2 and 3 were NES games, never came to the US. 4 was released in the US but numbered 2 here (and we only got the easy version). 5 wasn't released, 6 was released as 3. Finally Square decided to dispense with the bullshit and release the games as the orignal numbers in the US, and without dumbing down the translations.
As for Super Castelvania, simple naming convention of the time. Many launch titles for the Super Nintendo were prefixed with Super. This was done both as a marketing gimmick, but also as to help people avoid confusion. CV4 was a sequel, but not for the NES as the first 3 had been.
I'm sorry, but that one made me just laugh out loud. Oh, the terrible, hilariously inapropriate places one can go with that one. But even without any innuendo, it's still a ridiculous name. Say it with me: "Milk and Nuts" I mean whats it supposed to make you think?
I always thought "Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine" was a dumb name. The Japanese version was the same game but called "Puyo Puyo". Much more fun to say!
But I thought it was funny.
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
I'm surprised at the article not taking 'the easy way out' by listing countless Japanese titles that have been lost in translation. Regardless, I've always felt lemental Gear Bolt deserves some kind of honorable mention in the field. Even in Japanese the name sounds excessively weird.
How is Zzyzzyxx not on the list but Bad Dudes vs. Drangon Ninja is? Bad Dudes was a sweet name on an awesome (at the time) game. Zzyzzyxx wasn't even pronounceable. How were you supposed to talk to your friends about it (not that it was worth talking about).
I'm BAD! This list, however, is not.
Why is this on the list... it made perfect sense (Millions of Unusual Small Creatures Lurking Everywhere) if you remember the ton of flesh-colored little figures you could collect. I think I had a few of them myself.
I have to say, Seaman is a really bad game name!
And from the overused "titles with colons" department, the synonym-heavy (and possibly language-barrier-assisted) "Chasm: The Rift" (http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/chasmtherift/in dex.html). Didn't sell well enough to release the sequels: "Orifice: The Hole" and "Hemidemisemiquaver: The Sixty-Fourth Note".
They forgot my personal favorite : 'Ninja Golf'. Yes, ninjas playing golf, that's exactly what it is ...
It wasn't called "Nations of the World" it's called "Yakko's World". Just because the overwhelming majority of the geopolitical divisions he mentions are nations, doesn't mean it's exclusive or all-encompasing. :)
The voiceover leadin to the segment says "And now, the nations of the world, brought to you by Yakko Warner" which isn't explicit, either.
Okay, I played the original Ogre pocket game. It was pretty cool. One player plays the part of one very large, very powerful battle tank. The other player plays a swarm of small, fast-moving, easily swatable mini-battlebots. The object is to destroy the other guy. Neat tactical war game.
But where in the !@#$ did they come up with "Let Us Cling Together"? I'm guessing it is where the minibots can cling together to create one large bot. Defeats the whole point of the original and is an incredibly stupid name (hence its place in this list). Had to have been a marketing droid that came up with this one.
But why is the rum gone?
I remember what ended the "Avoid the Noid" campaign, or at least so I thought.
Back in 1989, a guy named Kenneth Noid held up a Domino's in Georgia and kept the employees hostage for 6 hours. The man was paranoid delusional and thought that the campaign was directed specifically at him. The stand-off ended with no one hurt, and I believe the guy got off with an insanity plea.
I remember this in the news when I was a kid, because I'm from Georgia. It was "the big story" that day.
Turns out though, according to the Wikipedia, the campaign was actually ended becase the artist who created the character wanted more money. That's kind of disturbing in a way.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Atari 2600: Name this Game. Like they couldn't figure out a name, so you're supposed to name it yourself. Or maybe it was a note from the programmers to the marketing team: Name this Game. So instead of naming it, they just used what the programmers penciled in.
God spoke to me.
My older brother and I, back when we slept in bunk beds, used to shine flashlights and chase each other's lights around the ceiling. Come to think of it, that was before Pong rocked our world. The flashlight game was a lot of fun.
How well I remember that epochal moment when, at Grandma's house on vacation, we discovered Pong. Grandma had it connected to her remote controlled TV set. (The remote caused the physical channel dial to turn, ka-chunk ka-chunk, around.) Pong was a heck of a party game, mostly because you couldn't play it solo. The AI for a computer paddle opponent wasn't quite there yet.
On the plus side: essentially no load time! Flip the switch and it's on, baby.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Engrish didn't count in their name choices. Made things way too easy if they tried to.
Can you believe they wanted to call it 'Highway-Crossing Frog: Helmet Chaos'?
or insightful, I guess.
The whole article was rather blah, but worth the time because of this blurb on "Huygen's Disclosure":
Spoiler Warning: Each point of an advancing wave front is in fact the center of a fresh disturbance and the source of a new train of waves; and the advancing wave as a whole may be regarded as the sum of all the secondary waves arising from points in the medium already traversed. Sign us up!
Last post!
The article says this about the 1994 game Awesome Possum:
Um, no it's not. I believe Berzerk was one of (if not the) first games to use digitized voice...and that was fourteen years before Awesome Possum. Why does does it seem that so many online video game reviewers/reporters/etc. think video games were invented in the mid-nineties?
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
But where's Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge (now with free scoring pencil!)? My Dinner With Andre? SimReich? Angus Pogordny's Caber Toss? Razor Fight II: The Slashening? And so on...
qntm.org
I expected to see Cyber Troopers: Virtual On Oratorio Tangram in the list. Does anyone happen to know if that name is just a peculiar "Engrish" translation? I mean, I know it's peculiar, but does it make any sense in Japanese?
...but I always thought most videogame consoles had lousy names. I mean, to start with. Did anybody else here think "GameCube" was a dumb name for a console? At least compared to its codename, Dolphin. Xbox? PlayStation - sounds like a pre-school toy. SNES? MegaDrive? Game Boy? Just think about them for a while. Tell me I'm not the only one who thinks this.
Of course, the fact of the matter is that console names grow on you after a short while. Like a joke getting old quickly. Nobody would dream of laughing at the names PlayStation or Game Boy nowadays. Six months from now nobody will raise an eyebrow at the name of the Nintendo Wii.
And, for some reason, the consoles with relatively "sophisticated" names - Phantom, Nuon, Jaguar, anybody? - tend to sink without trace...
qntm.org
I would say "Worst Names" are names of games that fall under not living up to the games thaey are associated with, such as "Final Fantasy" (which is now up to 'Final' number 12?)
Anything that is 'ultimate' would also apply. As mentioned "Microsoft Works" gets a lot of such ribbing for general purpose apps. I guess also for a name to be the worst also would be an offenseive in some way or other, which had lead to the sbysmal sale of whatever it was on (even if it was good). So "Microsoft Genuine Advanatage" (advantage for?) or "Plays For Sure" (for sure, anythjing??) would fall into thhe worst names category. I got another one "Nintendo Virtual Boy\" probably one of the worst uses for Virtual in a game!
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Clearly, the author has never heard of this gem from Japan. You drive an ambulance around hitting zombies.
FUN!
Most of the games on the list are quite old. They come off as being silly/stupid but still amusing. 'Princess Tomato in Salad Kingdom'? Sounds like a game I tried to write on my old C-64. But with modern media blasting us with ad-driven content, we get to see new lows in game-naming space. Here's a fairly recent entry that should have made the list:
Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie
Make fun of Ninja Hamster and Cacoma Knight in Bizyland all you want, but at least those game titles dont sound like a press release to some merchandising tie-in.
Berzerk used a voice synthesizer, so it doesn't qualify as digitized voice.
Besides, an earlier example of digitized voice is Castle Wolfenstein for the Apple 2 by Silas Warner of Muse Software. I'm not sure enough to call it the *first* game to use it, but it is one of the earliest.
Here's a link about the game:
http://www.wolfenstein.org/fanclub/castle_wolfens
Reminds me of this.
...for an all out nuclear war, according to a preview of that game in PC gamer.
"...and one actual geek fistfight."
Quick, someone hurry up and post this up to YouTube!
Particularly since I found out it's not a Japanese game.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
Wiki
For Sega CD... much worse than any of these, except maybe Wargasm =P
There's an RPG that came out not too long ago called "Drag-On Dragoon". I had to read the name a few times to believe it, myself. So, what is the game about? Knights that drag giant fire-breathing lizards behind them?
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Aaah, I'm surprised this didn't get on there. With all the other games up there whose names are great engrish sexual innuendos, you'd think a Korean game where you stick your finger up people's butts would make the cut.
My favourite bad game name: Aspic, for the Famicom Disk System.
Didn't click with me when I was a kid, but now it just makes me laugh.
Well, it could have been worse ... you could have spent hours of your youth playing "Ass Kong."
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Half-Life
Half-Life 2
Half-Life 2: Episode 1
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
I knew that had to be on there. It was pretty fun for a mindless hack 'n slash and came out during a lull in the CRPG business.
Best title evar: Zombies Ate My Neighbors. luh dat
FTFA : "Hey! You got your nuts in my milk! Hey! You got your milk on my nuts! Mmmmm."
Am I the only one surprised that they didn't come up with : "Hey! I got milk in my nuts!" instead?
You just got troll'd!
How did Doom 3 not make this list?
S.C.A.T. - Special Cybernetic Attack Team for the NES.
Totally not referring to the relationship of human excrement.
Could someone post the list??? I'm blocked out.