Harmonix and Red Octane. Silicon Knights and Epic Games. Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and Sierra Entertainment. Yes, industry breakups are almost always painful, prompting one or both parties to curl up on a couch with cookie dough ice cream and crank up the Sad Songs Megamix playlist on their iPods until the hurt finally goes away. The latter pair of exes, WBIE and Sierra, had been partners on the 2005 horror-shooter F.E.A.R., aka First Encounter Assault Recon. The developer was Monolith, which WBIE acquired in 2004. But when WBIE and Sierra parted ways last year, WBIE coolly walked off with everything but the title, leading us to believe that like Tina Turner in "What's Love Got to Do With It?" Sierra must have felt that it worked too hard for the name F.E.A.R. in order to give it up. We won't speculate on who was Ike and who was Tina; suffice it to say that WBIE was now in search of a title for its hit property.

In this age of reality TV, it made perfect sense that WBIE would turn to the fans to help name the sequel. The company held a contest titled "Name Your Fear"; an internal panel whittled the choices down to three finalists--no trademark violations allowed, kids--then fans were permitted to vote on the winner. We semi-facetiously suggested the name Phobos & Deimos to a good friend at WBIE (in flagrant violation of the post-Deus Ex rule which states that a game's title should never be derived from a classical language); needless to say, it wasn't chosen.

The three finalists were Dark Signal, Dead Echo and Project Origin; of the three, only Dark Signal evinced the proper amount of mystery, while the others merely triggered our well-known loathing for unimaginative titling. So you can imagine our dismay when WBIE announced today that the most thoroughly uninspired of the three choices, Project Origin, emerged victorious. It's possible that the name might accrue some meaning once we start seeing trailers and gameplay footage, but as it stands now, Project Origin--not to be confused with Project IGI: I'm Going In (2000), Project Gotham Racing (2001) Project Justice (2001), Project Eden (2001), Project Earth: Starmageddon (2002), Project Entropia (2003), Project: Snowblind (2005), Project Sylpheed: Arc of Deception (2007) or Project H.A.M.M.E.R. (unreleased and possibly cancelled)--is rivaled perhaps only by They and Legendary: The Box for sheer banality. We can only hope that WBIE's brain trust--a Supreme court, if you will--overturns the will of the people and comes up with a title more befitting one of 2005's best-reviewed games.