God of War's Kratos almost went by a different name, but developers at Santa Monica Studio made too many Domino's pizza jokes. David Jaffe, the director of the original God of War trilogy, recently put out a video explaining the deep dish issue.
Originally, Kratos was called “Dominus,” which Jaffe liked because it made him sound dominant and strong. Unfortunately, it also made him sound like a chain of pizza restaurants.
“The people on the team started making Domino’s Pizza jokes,” Jaffe said. “Every single time someone said Dominus, someone inevitably would yell out, ‘30 minutes or free,’ or, ‘Get the door, it’s Dominus.’
“After about the 50th time, the writing was on the wall. Dominus was dead and we needed a new name for our hero.”
Someone at the studio printed out a big list of Ancient Greek baby names and Jaffe went through with a yellow highlighter marking the best ones. “The names that I highlighted were not great,” he said, pointing at Julius, Parthenius, and Maksym as examples.
“Nothing felt just right. Eventually, our marketing lead, Susan Panico, was the one who came up with the name Kratos. She pitched it and we loved it, and it stuck.”
Jaffe found the list of highlighted baby names among his old design documents last year. On the sheet, hidden among the names, unhighlighted, there it was: Kratos.
“We had Sony’s biggest franchise hero in our hands the entire time and we didn’t even know it,” he said.
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