Riot's fighting game has sent its working name, Project L, to the flames. From the ashes rises its new, far more terrible moniker: 2XKO. Despite what looks to be a very gorgeous, well-made 2v2 fighting game, the naming choice has people perplexed. How the hell do you pronounce that? Too-eks-kay-oh? Too-times-kay-oh? Nobody on the PC Gamer team was quite sure, and my FGC group chat was going into a collective meltdown over the title.
Thankfully, the 2XKO Twitter page is on hand to let everyone know: "it's pronounced how it's spelled". There's even a handy video where executive producer Tom Cannon says the name out loud, in case you were still confused by the whole thing. That hasn't assuaged fans from expressing their dislike for the name though, with some of the replies absolutely going to town on the choice. "Its awful," one tweet candidly put it, while another said, "I will continue to call it Project L like I still call this site Twitter."
UltimateShadowX tweeted to say: "2XKO is such a lamer name than Project L," while FGC_Daily said "Imma be real with you gang, Project L went harder than 2XKO. The name is basically Double Knockout, which sounds quite generic, so they went with 2XKO??" My favourite tweet comes from Armand_Gman, who said "2XKO sounds like a thing when someone drops their phone on the keyboard and presses send". Multiple other tweets say how 2XKO sounds like something Elon Musk would name his child, or the name of a little-known K-Pop group.
Some fans are offering up their suggestions for what 2XKO should've been called. League of Legends streamer i0ki proposed the name "Lethal Tempo" and one of my FGC pals suggested "Double Kill" as a nice on-brand moniker that's still pretty close to Riot's original intention. Some of the other suggestions are equally terrible, but a few good ones are floating around on the timeline.
Personally, I gotta say I'm not a huge fan of it. While Project L was a relatively inoffensive name, it still rolls off the tongue a good deal better than 2XKO does. One of our team members described it as "mushy," which I think sums it up pretty well. It's a name that looks fine and dandy on paper, but feels awkward to say out loud. Even 2KO would've been a fine name, and offered one less confusing syllable to figure out how to pronounce.
To be fair to the team at Riot though, as someone who had a hand in trying to name our podcast, it's tough coming up with something fun, snappy, and original. That's a sentiment that Cannon has shared in the wake of all the name-dunking. "Naming is hard," he tweeted. "I actually didn't really dig the names of past projects at first (Evo, Radiant, Rising Thunder), but they grew on me over time. The team worked really hard to land on #2XKO, and I loved it right away! Glad so many of you do."
It's definitely not easy, and I'm sure it'll eventually be a name we'll all come around to eventually. There are far more ridiculous game names out there, and my brain can at least memorise 2XKO better than it can other fighting games like Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes.
