Former God of War Director, Stig Asmussen, has revealed that his first name was once accidentally considered as a potential name for the series protagonist before Santa Monica Studio settled for Kratos.
Speaking to Game Informer, Asmussen said that the development team was working with the studio’s marketing department to come up with an attractive name for the character. Several developers submitted a list of potential names, including Asmussen, who put his first name next to his proposed names in order to differentiate his list from the others. The marketing team thought Stig was one of the proposed names and it ended up being shortlisted!
We were trying to figure out Kratos’ name, and we were working with marketing on that and [David] Jaffe opened it up to the team. [Kratos’] working name for a long time was Dominus, but marketing didn’t like that. I don’t know how many members of the team submitted names, but I submitted maybe a handful of them and they went to marketing and they came back with four, maybe five names for Kratos. Kratos was one of them and Stig was one of them. I totally would have been cool with it.
Asmussen added that the development team was so used to the character being called Dominus that Kratos felt odd at first. Even the title God of War underwhelmed the developers.
“We were so used to Dominus,” he continued. “And at the time we were calling the game Dark Odyssey, and we really liked that name, but marketing thought it might be too high-brow, and people might not get it. A lot of us on the team were like, God of War?”
Asked what he thought of the new God of War, Asmussen revealed that he was skeptical about the direction at first but he feels that it turned out great.
Asmussen has worked on every God of War game to date except for the 2018 entry. He’s currently working on Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order with Respawn Entertainment.
[Source: Game Informer]
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