Your Forum Name/Gamer ID Origins

[arry_g]

I'm bored, the annoying thing about being a software engineer is that some larger software solutions take a while to compile

So, in order to know a bit more about you all I'd love to know where you're forum names come from... any interesting stories?

My forum name is boring. My name is Aaron any my mother always affectionately(?) referred to me as Arry, my surname is Green (hence the G). There you have it, Arry G.

I sometimes use the gamertags: SolitaryHippo and Ken Rage. Ken Rage is an anagram of A K Green (my name). Solitary Hippo comes from the fact that I'm a little fatter than I wish I were and I often like to play games alone (a habit I'm trying to break).

[Electric Crocosaurus]

Not much to say about mine. I've been using laj105 as an ID for years, ever since it was automatically generated for my hotmail address as a young teenager. In an effort to have a more memorable handle I picked what was the daftest name I could think of at the time; the 'Electric' probably comes from the infamous 'Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo', and I like dinosaurs. I'd like to change my gamertag, but as it costs 800 gamerpoints (or the equivalent in real monies) I can't justify it, so I remain boring old laj105.

[Beck]

I got my first character, a Night Elf Druid to level 60 in World of Warcraft and found that I had to heal to play end game content. This wasn't my thing so I decided to start a new character, I went an undead rogue which I named Beck. I chose beck after the title of an Anime I was watching at the time. I played Beck as my main character from Vanilla World of Warcraft through until the middle of the burning crusade.

I was well known as Beck and had some great times with that character. The name has just stuck from there, it folloed me to different games even though my characters weren't actually called Beck. In the end I just stuck with it

I'm not sure how the Anime would hold up now, it has been nearly ten years since I watched it. It was eventually cancelled but the Anime was based around a young lad who started to play guitar. It followed him through discovering different genres of music to eventually getting involved with his local music scene. Beck in the anime was one of the characters pet dog, this guy

[DomsBeard]

I'm a proud beard wearer and love the fact if certain tv or games characters are going through a tough time they grow a beard. Played Gears 3 about the time I joined here and the rest is history.

[arry_g]

I'm a proud beard wearer and love the fact if certain tv or games characters are going through a tough time they grow a beard. Played Gears 3 about the time I joined here and the rest is history.

I've never noticed that but you are right - it is practically a trope at this stage. Man suffers hardship, man grows beard (the more epic or badass the man, the more epic or badass the beard) and when said man is ready to let go of said hardship he shaves said beard otherwise he dies wearing it.

[Todinho]

I've been with this nickname for at least 11 years now it all started when I switched schools(in fifth grade(?) I dont know how well schools systems translate beteween countries) I was never good at making friends and since I didnt know anybody there and the kids were already pretty close with their own group of friends I tended to keep to myself ,now as a kid I was really short and people made fun of me on a regular basis because of it so that didnt really encourage me to make any friends either, but one day I was at the yard of the school having lunch minding my bussiness and one of my classmates,a huge kid(or at least he seemed huge at the time) that would ocasionally make fun of me,turned over to me and asked for my toodynho(it's a brand of boxed chocolate milk here ) I gave to him since I didnt like it all that much,and because I didnt want any trouble,but from that point on he just started calling me toodynho .Now I dont know if it was to mock me or was just a innocent nickname because he didnt actually know my name but it turned out people tend to remember you alot more if you're called toodynho,it spreaded pretty fast so I went from a nobody people didnt know existed to someone that everybody in the school knew in the course of a week.

I didnt really know what to make of it so I did the only thing that I could and took ownership of it I didnt know if this nickname was mocking me or not but I knew it would much harder to mock me if acted like I liked it,and it worked I was able to make friends soon after that and even if my circle of friends was small everybody talked to me and nobody in school made fun of me again! I grew so fond of this nickname after that I used it for everything when I started using the internet(I just changed the way it's written because I didnt want it to be literally the brand of chocolate milk) and when I was aproved to enter a pretty good public high school I used this nickname to "break the ice" with my new class and it worked again!It may sound a bit silly but I dont think I would have half the friends I have today without it,especially since im usually pretty tough person to talk to if im not familiar with the person.

So there you go it must sound like a bad high school movie plot but this is pretty much it!

[Bakers_12]

My one I my surname followed by a number associated with it. I have used it for nearly twenty years from my first e mail account to xbox gamer tag until I jumped onto my first playstation where I have a far more contrived variant

[dezm0nd]

When Counter-Strike first came about (and I mean 0.1, cs_mansion style) we were playing videogames in the back of an indie computer shop (I worked in the indie console shop) where we had 8 stations ready for us and for customers to play games.

Rather bizarrely there were three Darrens in one room. We had Darren, Daz and then me... where will I go? How can I fit in?

Dez!

Thus, dezm0nd was a natural extension. Much prefer it to my original alias of 'Boggy' from Banjo-Kazooie fame.

[countstex]

I think I've given this explanation before somewhere, but probably lost to the way back when machine by now!

My name is Steven, and back when I started playing games.. ok ok, back when games started, you tended to only get three letters for your highscore in arcades and, later on home computers. So I naturally shortened my name to Ste, which was normal for me as, being from Liverpool, everyone's name is reduced to a single syllable anyway!

Now every so often, for some reason, certain games would give you a forth character. Rather than leave it blank I took to adding an X for that anonymous, cool effect. Well ok pre-pubescent me thought it was cool anyway. So Stex on it's own has been my name for several decades. However I used to supplement it with openers. For a long time I was Jabba Stex, due to being overweight, and frankly not the best looking of chaps But there where others too.

However role on 1998 and I started chatting to a Danish girl via ICQ (A bit like Facebook Messenger on your phone for you youngsters, except not on a phone, because our phones could only like.. phone. OK and SMS). Being foreign she assumed all English people where wealthy land owners who drove around in Range Rovers all day. Thus I decided to add an honorific Count to my name. Thus Count Stex was born and has stuck with me since then. Of course the fact it looks like Count Sex at a quick glance if just a happy coincidence, and in no way was part of my sticking with the name, nope, no siree!

Oh yes, and I married that Danish girl in 2010, after 12 years of happy same room co-op fun. Not always involving games. But usually.

[Alex79]

My name is Alex, I was born in 1979 and I'm from the.... well. You get the idea with that.

[James]

So there you go it must sound like a bad high school movie plot but this is pretty much it!

Bad high school movies are the best!

And that story is something you should be proud of. You took a bad situation and turned it around when you had every right to let it get you down.

I've never heard of Toddynho until today, but if I ever see a box I'll let you know.

[The_Rooster]

My name is Russell and while working at Next (clothes shop). One of the lads there started calling me Russ the Rooster. Then Rooster stuck and few of my mates started calling me it. Then I set up an email account with it and rooster became my online name.

The V1 was added when all the versions of The Rooster were taken on xbox. I enjoyed wrestling at the time and I think it was Jeff Hardy used to do a V1 (short for version 1) signal with his fingers which I thought was quite cool at the time. Haven't come across anyone else using it.

When my friends called me Rooster when we were out if a girl asked why I normally say it's coz I have a big....

It never worked!!

[ratsoalbion]

A big comb?

[James]

A big wattle. Definitely.

[arry_g]

My name is Russell and while working at Next (clothes shop). One of the lads there started calling me Russ the Rooster. Then Rooster stuck and few of my mates started calling me it. Then I set up an email account with it and rooster became my online name.

The V1 was added when all the versions of The Rooster were taken on xbox. I enjoyed wrestling at the time and I think it was Jeff Hardy used to do a V1 (short for version 1) signal with his fingers which I thought was quite cool at the time. Haven't come across anyone else using it.

When my friends called me Rooster when we were out if a girl asked why I normally say it's coz I have a big....

It never worked!!

I met someone online once (a Guild Wars forum I believe) who went by the name 'Rooster' online and when answering a thread much like this one he answered in five words "because I'm a total c**k!". It's a shame he got banned by the admin for profanity.

[The_Rooster]

That's why I didn't want to write it.

[Tleprie]

Just saw this thread, thought I'd add my origin story to the rest:

Me and a friend got Final Fantasy: My Life as a King on the Wii, and were trying to come up with a cool name for our city. I think I just made him put in some random letters, tle, and I finished it off with prie. It was a while before I adopted it as my own online name, but now I use it for pretty much everything.

[ratsoalbion]

Yep, that's pretty random.

[arry_g]

Just saw this thread, thought I'd add my origin story to the rest:

Me and a friend got Final Fantasy: My Life as a King on the Wii, and were trying to come up with a cool name for our city. I think I just made him put in some random letters, tle, and I finished it off with prie. It was a while before I adopted it as my own online name, but now I use it for pretty much everything.

I love knowing where people's online names come from, it can be anything from childhood nickname, to personification of their fandom to random series of letters that stuck!

[richie_in_japan]

My name's Richard and I was living in Japan when I first made a PSN account. The underscores are because someone already had richieinjapan. A truly inspirational origin story.