Welcome to needless rant corner! Your host for today; yours truly.
In one of the most irritating trends of recent years, it seems increasingly okay in games and movies to drop all admittance of serialisation and with brash and unapologetic disregard simply use the original title of the first installment; “Star Trek”, “Tomb Raider”, “Devil May Cry”, “Aliens vs Predator”, “Sim City”; as though we’d forgotten there was one already. Games are particularly guilty of this.
To a categorising brain like mine this is just… no. You are duplicating the primary key as far as I’m concerned. A film or game has a full title which should be unique, certainly within a series. I don’t care if it’s a large number of sequels, or if the original is really old (from over twenty years ago, maybe). The only thing worse than a ridiculously big suffixed number for a sequel is to simply drop a differentiator altogether and act as though it never happened. If they’re worried about a number making it sound un-original- well, there’s your clue: make something original.
What I think actually bothers me though is that it feels like an insidious attempt at replacing the past. It is eerily reminiscent of the role of protagonist Winston Smith, in the novel Nineteen Eighty Four:
“As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of The Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs — to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date.”
Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell
