Yet another company naming thread

[GarageGothic]

As I've already asked you to help me with feedback on a game title (I decided on "Shadowplay"), I might as well ask for your comments on these suggestions for company names. I saw somebody else started a thread like this a week or so ago, and I hope you're still up to it.

Here we go:

1) Toys in the Attic

I really like this phrase, but lots of people have already used it. I got it from The Trial on Pink Floyd's The Wall, but apparently it's also an R.E.M. song as well as an Aerosmith album. Plus tons of other things. I like the creepiness of it, and I love how it suggests that adventure games are the toys of my childhood that I retrieve from the attic by making my own games.

2) Pandemonium Shadowshow

I know it's really Shadow Show, in two words, but I think this looks better. It's a reference to Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show in Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes (thinking of it, "Something Wicked" might be a good name as well)

3) Camera Obscura

Not sure that I like this, but it came to me while walking to the train this morning, and I liked the sound. The meaning on the other hand is more, pardon the pun, obscure. It means "The Dark Chamber" and it's a sort of early camera (although it doesn't store the image) that projects an image upside down on a wall or a canvas so an artist could trace the image onto a drawing or painting.

Your comments would be appreciated

[Miez]

I personally like the sound of "Dark Chamber" more than "Camera Obscura".

[Proskrito]

my favourite is Toys in the attic, and next camera obscura. I dont like pandemonium shadowshow, it fulls your mouth when you say it, dont know if i make sense.
(btw, is Camera Obscura meant to be spanish?)

[AGA]

Camera = Latin for room Obscura = Latin for dark

[SSH]

Camera Obscura is not so obscure... I learned about them at school and there is one in Edinburgh and one is Bristol:

http://www.camera-obscura.co.uk/

They are really good for mysteries. I'm sure that the Edinburgh one has featured in a book I read where someone saw a murder or an affair or something through the camera... maybe someone could do something similar in a game...

Hmm, anyway,

Toys in the Attic: kinda the opposite of Tales from the Crypt? Good idea, but I don't like the word "toys" in it. I don't know why. "Adventures in the Attic"? "Attic Attack"... oops, been done.

Camera Obscura has great potential for an animated logo... just like looking at the text through a real camera obscura (now, can any Latin boffs tell us what the plural is?)

Dark Chamber: cool.

Pandemonium Shadowshow: reminds me of Salma Hayek's character in from Dusk till Dawn

Maybe "Teatro Oscuro", or whatever the Latin for Dark Theatre is.

[Goldmund]

Somehow I cannot imagine a pandemonium shadowshow.
I cannot get rid of the impression that pandemonium involves lots of fire, explosions, satanic roars and pools of boiling blood.
And Shadow-shows are too wimpy - okay, subtle - for pandemoniums.

[GarageGothic]

Thanks for the feedback. I think I'll end up using Camera Obscura, most people seemed to like that, and it's really grown on me since I came up with it yesterday. So much can be read into it.

I liked SSH's suggestion about Teatro Oscuro though, and I'm still considering it. It reminded me of the Danny Elfman anthology (can you say that, or does there have to be more than one artist represented in an anthology?) album "Music for a Darkened Theatre". I even made a map for a 3d shooter once, which I called "The Darkened Theatre". Plus it makes me think of the Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive for some reason.