I came up with Roivaskrad when I found the first class that got me in a game: Death Knight in WoW, as I have always gravitated toward the damage focused classes that either use a big 2h weapon or flashy spells and the DK was both of those. I figured as a Death Knight that the dark background (reanimated to serve some - usually - evil being) along with now being a hero could be combined to make a good name thus the origin: ‘Dark Savior’. But it just seemed too generic.
So I added some of my personality to it by reversing the words/letters: ‘Dark Savior’ <-> ‘roivaS kraD’ and of course fixing the capitalization to fit the new order and combined them into a single name as that seemed to roll of the tongue easier: ‘roivaS kraD’ -> ‘Roivaskrad’.
I was definitely the first to be using this in WoW as I had the only 3 characters with this name for like 3-4 years, but it seems to have caught on as I have moved servers many times. I’ve also often been asked if it’s Russian, but as I don’t speak Russian I simply say no and assume that is correct
FFXI has been extremely meaningful to me for a large portion of the past 15 years. I also like black metal a lot, and seeing how Varg plucked “Burzum” out of the Black Speech, I realized FFXI was to me what LOTR was to him, in the sense that I became obsessed with the lore. So I sought out to find a name in homage to my greatest video game love. Vahzl has a bit of a black metal ring to it as well without sounding too “FF-ish” or being a direct name of a zone/NPC/well-known weapon, so I knew it was right when all this dawned on me.
Vainqueur is a double entendre. It simply means victor in French (as in, “to the victor go the spoils”), but also, well, it can also describe me pretty accurately if you break the syllables apart.
Lucian is very common but stuck with me after Never Winter Nights character creation randomly chose it for my first character. Due to how common it is, I use variants of moon related words (e.g. Tide) to create a unique name.
As a side note, NWN is also why I became a programmer. NWN had a toolset/API to build your own adventures and on their website was an ‘Intro to C/C++’ course. I took that course and became enamored with coding.
Mine is from when I was a kid me and my friends used to skate (skateboarding) and we decided we needed a group name, I was from Bolton at the time, so decided to settle on Bolton Squad for our skate team name
Back in 2001 I got my first Windows PC (I’d been a die-hard Amiga user until then) and my brother said: “You’ve got to try this game, it’s called Counter Strike.” So I got it all installed using our shiny new ADSL connection and then he said: “You have to pick a gamer tag.” In a hurry to actually play the game I just picked a secondary character out of my favourite book (Neuromancer by William Gibson) thinking it probably wouldn’t be too common (wrong!) and I’ve stuck with it ever since.
In the all the all too frequent cases where the name is already taken or a surname is required I append our old CS clan tag in some form, so a lot of my characters are called Wintermute of CoF or Wintermute Ofcof. In games where I have multiple characters they get named after other William Gibson characters.
Well its Kotli had trouble coming up with a name in a game. Everything I tried was taken so I thought about it and came up with Kotli a shortened version of Knight of the Light in a form that looks like it could be a name.
Well if we talk about my “Nickname” itself:
Do you folks know Forum-RPG’s. It’s the kind of Roleplay Game which resembles the classic tabletop / pen & paper RPGs, sometimes there is a Gamemaster, often the creator plays the RPG as well and only sets the rules. But everyone create Character based on the ruleset etc, and you kinda “write” a story together and so on.
I did play that often in my “younger” days and really enjoyed / loved that stuff, and one of my Characters, made for an RPG which is based on Animes but with an “Hero” Topic where the Folks you play have Superpower, i created a Character named Yuudai. (googled different names) And funnily enough i’ve some paradox logic, that while i have IRL a huge fear and respect for thunderstorms, espcially Lightning, it’s one of my most Favorite Elements in Videogames. So i thought for the (Hero)name i mixed the Element of his Power with Yu as a shorter / nickname for Yuudai, and called it LightningYu. Later on the road, after the Forum closed i kinda took over the Name as a Nickname for myself(and since than i never called any Character “LightningYu” anymore, but sometimes if it’s an Asian Character i still call him “Yuudai”. Some People associate my Nickname with Lightning from Final Fantasy 13, and it have absolute no connection to it, because at the time the Nickname was created Lightning not even existed and i hadn’t touched Final Fantasy, ironically i’ve to admit Lightning is really one of my Favorite FF Characters.
If we talk about Ingame-Characters and their Naming, it splits in two sides: Some which are based on Favorite Characters of other Franchises, some where i simply liked the sound of the Name.
A majority of my male Characters i call Ragon Monkey, Ragon is based on “Dragon” and besides Wolves IMHO if it’s about mythical Creatures Dragon and Monkey (like Sun Wukong) are the coolest mythical Animals for me. And i cut the “D” out of Dragon because Ragon still sounds close enough but didn’t made it obvious. Once i started watching One Piece i even had sometimes put a “D” between Ragon Monkey(and yes, for People who know One Piece they will see an funny coincidence about that, which i didn’t know at the time).
For Female Characters i often use Selina (Myle) which inspired by Catwoman Selina Kyle. It’s not only because i’m kinda a Fan of her, it’s more over that i like the ring of her Name.
Then i’ve belroth which was inspired by Balrog and so further. (use it often for Mage-Classes, focus on fire spells).
An old MMORPG I used to play had a skill called Frozen Ice so I made a toon called MeltedWater to poke fun of the name, and that toon became my main. When a few friends from the game introduced me to League of Legends, I named my account there MeltedWater. I played LoL extensively, and so the name really stuck. I have used it on like everything since.
