From Alan Wake to Miles Prower: what are the best pun names in gaming?

From Alan Wake (he’s A. Wake, get it? Get it?) to Miles Prower, there are loads of video game protagonists whose names are rubbish puns. Well, actually there aren’t, but it’s happened just often enough that there’s sufficient material for this edition of VG247’s Best Games Ever Podcast.

Halloween fell between the gaps of our posting schedule, so we couldn’t really justify doing a Best Spooky Game That You Couldn’t Finish episode, and Guy Fawkes night also doesn’t occur for another couple of days, so we can’t do a Best Game That Makes Light Of Religious Persecution either. But here’s the next best thing – a topic that we can link to the year’s best horror game, Alan Wake 2, on account of developer Remedy’s penchant for giving their characters the most entertainingly daft names despite putting them in serious games with mature themes. Like “staying up past your bedtime”, or “doing that cool thing from The Matrix where you leap across a room firing guns”.

But which game featuring a protagonist with a stupid punny name is the best one? And what exactly is a pun? Why is that if I say “talking skull”, you imagine something like Boney from Trap Door or Murray from Monkey Island, where it’s the bleached skull of a dead person reanimated by supernatural means, rather than thinking of the talking skull that you yourself actually live in, or the dozens of talking skulls that you interact with on a daily basis? Not a single one of these questions is answered in this episode, but we do argue a lot, so you’ll probably like it.