Les Professionnels 1 Page 4 – The Name Game
One of the “linear” jokes I was talking about is the ridiculousness of player character names in City of Heroes/Villains. Dr. Dark Dark Evil Dark (mentioned on page 2) was not far off from a guy one of my villain characters pulled a heist with once.
I was just going to do a rip of Ocean’s 11. It was so poorly received by people who didn’t remember the “you think we need another guy” scene, that I dropped it, and this scene became about names.
On the first day of City of Heroes’ public release, the names of several characters I had created were already taken. I wound up having to use synonyms, alternate spellings, and parodies to get the character names I wanted.
For those who don’t play MMO Games, I’ll digress a little. When you play one of these games, you do so as a “player [controlled] character,” in a copy of the fictional world called a “server.” City of Heroes operates 16 such servers. On each server, each player character must have a unique name. It’s like an email address at a given email provider. So, where I might be able to play a character named “Power Kid” on one server, that name was taken by other people on the other 15. So it is unavailable to me on any of those other servers.
For the record, no variation of the names “Power Kid” nor “Spike Power” was played by Marc or me on any CoH server.
Lil’ Pro actually had this same problem. We were able to make “Big Pro,” but “Little Pro” was already taken. Naming “Venti” was an extension of this, and a jab at a certain trend in restaurants.
Also for the record, the Pros had “Super Jumping” as their travel power. That’s what they’re doing here. This isn’t a rip of the closing credits of “The Man Show.”