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Why we called our game Albion

Some time in 1994 we (the Albion team) were thinking of a name for our new role-playing game. We knew it would involve Celtic culture somehow. As well as spaceships and aliens, of course.

Some of my personal criteria for game titles were:

  • It's nice when a game’s title starts with an "a", because then the game shows up at the top of alphabetized lists.
  • It's nice when the game’s title is not truncated by the operating system. Albion was a DOS game, so it’s nice to have a name of eight characters or less.

However. Albion started off as an Amiga game, and Amiga’s operating system allowed longer filenames than DOS. So either we came up with the name after we made the decision to switch to DOS (because Commodore had gone bankrupt), or we were just lucky in this regard.

So someone, maybe me, came up with "Albion". We didn't know what it meant, but we knew it sounded vaguely Celtic. As this was before we could have looked this up on Wikipedia or Google, we had no idea Albion meant England… In retrospect it’s a weird name that creates associations that have nothing to do with the game. This is probably how Japanese developers pick names all the time.

Anyway, that's how we came up with the name.