Game Name Generator

A title has three jobs

It has to be findable, sayable, and it has to make a promise.

That is harder than it sounds, because the three pull against each other. The most beautiful title is often the least findable. The most findable is often a made-up word nobody can spell. And a title that promises too much has to be paid for later by the game.

Run your eye down the titles this generator hands you. They are the games that worked, and they solved that problem in a very small number of ways.

The three shapes almost every title takes

The invented word. Minecraft. Fortnite. Two ordinary English words welded into one that did not exist before. It belongs to nobody else, it can be spelled after hearing it once, and it says what the game is while sounding like a place rather than a description.

The franchise plus a subtitle. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Call of Duty: Warzone. The part before the colon is a promise the reader has already decided about. The part after it is the only new information in the whole line.

The number. Grand Theft Auto V. Red Dead Redemption 2. The number is not decoration. It is a sentence that reads: you know exactly what this is, there is more of it, and we are not going to insult you by pretending otherwise.

Then there is the fourth kind, and it is the hardest. The plain English phrase. Among Us. Control. Journey. These are almost impossible to pull off, because you are taking a word that already belongs to the language and trying to make people think of you when they hear it.

Notice that Among Us does something clever to earn it. Two words that were never a phrase before, that describe the entire mechanic of the game in three syllables, and that mean something different once you have played it.

The subtitle is where the promise lives

Here is a thing worth staring at. In a title like Breath of the Wild, the subtitle contains no nouns from the game. No sword, no princess, no kingdom. It is a feeling.

That is the pattern in almost every subtitle that has ever worked. The franchise name tells you what it is. The subtitle tells you what this one will feel like. New Horizons is not a feature list. It is a mood, sold to people who already know what the game does.

Which is why a subtitle full of nouns reads like a product. A subtitle full of weather, distance and light reads like somewhere you would like to go.

And there is a practical reason for the colon, too. It splits the title into a part that stays and a part that changes. The half in front accumulates value over years. The half behind it can be thrown away and rebuilt for every release.

A title is also a search box

Every title is going to be typed into a search bar by somebody who half remembers it.

This is where the ordinary English words get expensive. Name your game Control and you have picked a word that the entire language was already using. Name it Journey and you have chosen a word that appears in a hundred thousand other sentences.

Both are wonderful titles. Both had to be strong enough to drag a common word away from its meaning, and only a very good game can do that.

The invented compound has no such problem. Nobody was searching for Minecraft before Minecraft. The word arrives empty and gets filled with exactly one thing.

So the choice is real, and it is not about taste. A common word is a beautiful title with a tax attached. A made-up word is an ugly duckling that owns its own search results from the first day.

Titles that survive being said

A game title has to move through people's mouths. It gets recommended across a table, said into a microphone, shouted across a shop.

There is decent evidence this matters. Work on brand names has found that names which are easier to pronounce are trusted more, and that the ease of saying a thing quietly colours how people feel about the thing itself. Your brain finds the word easy, mistakes that ease for a good feeling, and hands the good feeling to the product.

Read the successful titles aloud and you can hear it. Short vowels. Hard stops. Nothing that needs spelling. Doom. Portal. Fortnite. Not one of them requires the speaker to slow down.

Then there is the shortening, which happens to every title with more than two words in it. Nobody says the full name of a long-running franchise. They say the initials, or the first word, or the subtitle on its own.

Good titles are built so that the shortening still works. If your game is going to be known by three letters, choose the three letters.

Naming a game of your own

Everything above collapses into a short list.

Take two ordinary words that have never met, and see whether the collision makes a place. That is where the invented compound comes from, and it is the single most reliable move in the whole business.

Say it out loud to somebody and ask them to spell it. If they can, it is findable.

Search for it before you fall in love with it. If a common word already owns those results, you are signing up to fight for them.

Make sure it promises something you can deliver. A title is a contract, and the reviews are where it gets enforced.

And if this is the first of several, put the seam in. Decide now which half of the name is the part that stays.

About this list

The titles come from a list our team researched and checked by hand, drawn from games that shaped the medium. One is chosen at random each time you press the button. It runs on your own device, and nothing you type is sent anywhere.

Questions people ask about game titles

Why do so many games use a colon?

Because it separates the part of the name that carries years of recognition from the part that describes this particular release. The franchise stays, the subtitle is rebuilt each time, and both halves get to do a job they are good at.

Numbered sequel or a subtitle?

A number says the game is a continuation and expects you to have context. A subtitle says the game is a fresh entry point. Series that want new players tend to drift away from numbers, which is why so many long-running franchises quietly stop counting.

Is a single-word title better?

It is stronger to say and harder to find. A single common word makes a memorable title and a difficult search result. A single invented word makes a slightly stranger title and owns its search results outright.

What if the name I want already exists?

The franchise name is the thing that gathers value over the years, so it is the part worth making unmistakably yours. Change a word rather than adding one. Two familiar words nobody has joined before will almost always still be free.

How long can a title be?

As long as its short form is good. Every title over two words gets shortened by players within a month, so the real question is not how long the title is. It is what is left of it after everybody stops saying the rest.

References

1. Staying true to your word: how brand name pronounceability shapes brand credibility in marketing communication. Current Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-07171-2
2. Laham, S. M., Koval, P. and Alter, A. L. (2012). The name-pronunciation effect: Why people like Mr. Smith more than Mr. Colquhoun. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(3), 752 to 756. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2011.12.002