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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."
Wild Woody huh... Could've been worse, they could have had a sequel. "Wild Woody meets Mad Pussy" or something
Infiltrated dot Net
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.
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.
Lake Titicaca! Lake Titicaca!
Why do we sing of its fame?
Lake Titicaca! Lake Titicaca!
'Cause we really like saying its name!
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.
Yes, the game was actually called Linkle Liver Story.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkle_Liver_Story
Actually, I recall that Wargasm's title had little to do with the game (beyond the "War" part, anyway). To quote IGN: "Apparently someone at DID's marketing department thought that the 'kids' might dig it if they took their latest action title, put a woman in a bulging flak jacket on the cover (maybe she's carrying a bunch of grenades) and named it after something sexual. The PR staff picked up on the Beavis and Butthead vibe and began sending us sheaves of mail with jokes like 'It's time for Wargasm' and 'Multiple Wargasm.' After this ridiculous blitzkrieg of banality (which must have humiliated the actual design team beyond measure) Tal, Jason and I began furiously scrapping over who was going to have to review a game that was sure to be as embarrassing on the inside as it was on the out. I lost (for those of you who keep track of such things, let me warn you that Jason carries brass knuckles) and sadly loaded the game only to find that there was nothing within the actual software that had anything to do with the title, the chick on the cover or anything else we received in the mail. What I did find was a solid action game that is surprisingly hard to put down." So the name clearly turned people off to the game who might otherwise have enjoyed it. That's about as bad as a name can be.
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.
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Miyamoto's said as much in his interviews.
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...
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
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
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.
Oh, right. Names. Not the games themselves. Goddamn I'm dumb.
Then yes, it was dumb.
I was wondering why so many of these games weren't actually that bad. Well, there ya go.
Yes, but that's irrelevant. Mega Man X is a separate branch of similar games. X was released between 6 and 7. Yes, it's interesting that there were 9 standard Mega Man games, but the "X" in Mega Man X is an X, not a ten.
And also, 7 and 8 were released in the US. 9 (Rockman and Forte/Mega Man & Bass) was eventually ported to the GBA.
Unfortunately, I can't remember the source, so take it as you will.
In an interview with Miyamoto, he said that he wanted to call the game "Stubborn Monkey" (because the monkey wouldn't give Jumpman/Mario's woman back). After the standard Engrish translation, Stubborn became Dnokey, and Monkey became Kong, giving us the title we've been seeing for the last quarter-century.
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.
I have to say, Seaman is a really bad game name!
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.
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.
The SNES game Super Castlevania IV is more of a retelling of the events of the first Castlevania NES game than a true, chronological sequel. But then, Castlevania III took place two generations prior to the events of Castlevanias I and II, and subsequent CV games have been all over the timeline, so who knows.
I had them too, but the question is why they chose that horrible acronym. The original source material is a Japanese character named Kinnikuman (or "Muscle Man"), a goofy series about wrestling and giant monster (parodying Ultraman in the beginning). The little M.U.S.C.L.E. toys were little figures sold in plastic capsules from vending machines in Japan that they decided to bring over to the US without the original backstory.
The decision to the call them "Millions of Unusual Small Creatures Lurking Everywhere" is actually kind of funny considering that Kinnikuman actually was human sized or larger in the original material.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I always thought that "Wargy" would have been a better name for multiplayer Wargasm.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
The exact etymology of Donkey Kong's title is debatable. My favourite honest-to-goodness botched transliteration is that great big-top racing sim, Continental Circus.