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Namco Bandai explains why they register so many Tales name trademarks

by rawmeatcowboy
14 October 2013
GN Version 4.0
A portion of a Siliconera interview with Namco Bandai's Hideo Baba...

S: A short while back it was discovered that Namco Bandai registered a bunch of trademarks, such as Tales of Zestoria, Tales of Bibliotheca, et cetera. What’s with all these funny names? Do you have fun with coming up all these?

Hideo Baba, producer: Well, the Tales development team and I are always thinking about new stories and themes for future games in the series. And whenever we do come up with something interesting, we’re always thinking about, wouldn’t it be great if we could call this game by a certain name, to go with its story and theme?

There is always the possibility that we may end up actually making a new Tales game by that title [we've registered the trademarks for], but before that, we need to first check if it is okay to use that title both in Western markets and in Japan.

So, there is a possibility there that of all these ideas we’ve come up with, one of them may end up being put into development, but at the moment, we’re just checking that these names can be used. Nothing’s been decided yet.

S: Is the current situation, where you’d go out and register a bunch of trademarks in advance, prompted by past experiences like running into a scenario where you actually really wanted to call a Tales game by a certain title, but simply couldn’t because the name was taken already?

HB: Yes, that’s exactly right.

Full interview here