How Did Your Gamer Name Become Your Gamer Name?

Your gamertag, nickname, whatever you want to call it. How did you land on yours?

Mine started out as a name for my main character in WoW. Warangel just seemed like an appropriate name for a retribution paladin. From there it became the name I use for pretty much all my gaming endeavors.

Basically same situation as yours, WoW character name I used and then just decided to continue using it for convenience. :)

My identity is a really old one. It came from my early days playing yahoo pool. These days I prefer to go by Cue but it's usually always taken or whatever platform I'm signing up to needs 4 or more characters minimum so I just go for the full name cue killar. Geez I've been called this for over 20 years now D:  I feel so old now! 

I met the illustrious Giant Haystacks when I was a kid.  He was, and still is, the largest thing ever and deserves to be remembered. :)

No context needed. One of the best characters and shows ever :)

I wanted something dark and shady, to evoke Rogue, and natural, to evoke Druid. And that's where "Raven" comes from.

Then i wanted a radiant (but still natural) image, to bring balance, and that's the "Sun".

Merging them together, generating some half-poetic oxymoron is meant to evoke the 'magical' power of words (Mage and Priest).

I played a bit of Warcraft III and loved the name: "Kel Thuzad", so I started playing with it Counter Strike. After a while I realized that I had spelled it wrong but didn't change it, so I stuck with thazud. 

Mine is a handle I have for all my gamer names - Xbox/PSN/PC.  Originated from my college days where we would LAN party (yes that old) Medal of Honor Allied Assault.  My dorm room had early fiber optics, so I would host MP games.  For those that played MOH Allied Assault, my favorite map was Destroyed Village were I would always lead with sniper kills.  Players would always see my character at the last minute and described me as a dark shadow, so I twisted the name to Darkersilhoutte (mispelled due to character constraints)

from final fantasy 10 . i just loved this creature. wants to destroy everything, sometimes i feel like that too

Long story... But ultimately it started with a childhood taunting nickname... Tadpole.  Well, I grew up.  A grown tadpole is a frog.  The Hydra part though, I'm still at a loss for knowing the origins for me.  Nonetheless, Hydrafrog is where I am.

Mine is simple. The inFamous game series is one of my favourite of all time, and the 'super-powered' beings in that game are called Conduits. I've always liked the name and it's just stuck.

Synesthesy is a name I often use in real life too.

It came from this

I grew up watching "Charmed",to this day it's still one of my favourite Tv Shows and I cry whenever I watch the last the episode so my name comes from my favourite character from the show and my birth year... 

My IGN is based off of two talents you can pick in a game called Natural Selection.  When you played on the marines side.  I always chose Shot gun then resupply so I put them together to make my name.

I can't say I really have a 'gamer name' I have a different username for different things, it is usually my favorite character from a movie/book at the moment. I was EbonyMaw on hearthpwn, Jarvis in hearthstone, and Clerck (a DnD character of mine) on twitch.

During early WoW Vanilla I had this Priest with a staff called Benediction that was a pretty hard item to get (I was the first on my server) and it vaguely resembles a spoon. Many guild mates begin making joke about it and so being an Holy Priest I ask for a name change with a ticket to a GM.

Than I used it almost everywhere as nickname since is almost unique.

My nickname “Siggy” was created 28 years ago when friends wanted to shorten my real name Siegfried and I didn't like anything they came up with so I made my own nickname Siggy. A few years ago I officially changed my real name from “Siegfried J.B.” to “Siegfried Siggy”.

I like Murlocs

My GT Is Nurgles Socks. (which is a name I created especially for Hearthstone, but is now my name in WoW and D3 and stuff as well as they all share 1 name. I typically choose a different name on each platform, so I'm something else on steam and then something else on Xbox live and again for PSN)

I just go by the name "Nurgz" mostly though for short. (at least in WoW where I actually have friends anyway)

The name basically came about because Nurgle is the God of Pestilence in Warhammer, so it's pretty filthy. Now there was this TV show in the UK called "The Young Ones" from the 70's and there's this bit where the character "Vivian" has sentient socks because they are that dirty. They basically come to life and start to terrorize the other house-mates in the show. 

So I came up with the idea for a character that was basically the God Nurgles Socks that in the same vein as Vivian's Socks, had became sentient and were playing Hearthstone. So the idea is that if you are playing against me, you're actually playing against a sentient pair of socks once owned by the God of pestilence. 


You asked. Ha, Ha.

Well, here my nick is Alleria, which I think is quite obvious that I like that character a lot :)

But my all time gamer name is very strange, mostly its origin. It was a long time ago my brother convinced me to play Diablo, so I had to choose my nickname. I never played such game, so I typed the first thing that came to my mind, thinking it doesnt really matter, because I didnt plan to play it that much. So little I knew :) My nickname is Ipik, and it comes from my school days, when we had to go to the hospital for practice. There was an old russian machine with huge letters IPIK on it, it was so loud and made so many different noises so we students had a good laugh about it. Everyday we asked: "How´s Ipik today?" and it became our "mascot" :P So I stuck to it :)

Got mine about 25 years or so ago. 
Though originally it was my little brother's username in games. He would be Scorpion and I would be SubZero.

When Everquest and the original Counterstrike (Half Life Mod) came along (and he moved on to sport rather than video games), I took the username because I preferred it, and changed the letter so as not to be a total copy! Haha! :-D

One word: METALLICA

Im bad coming up with special cool names, so I´ve always gone with my last name. the older i got, the more cool it became ;)

Not much story for mine.. R.S. are my initials, kinda sounds like a greek god- good enough!

Wherever I can't get aReS as a nick I merge it with an old nick I had- StingRay (aReSting). The Sting part is also cause I don't dislike "Sting and The Police".

Fun fact: The boar is a symbol of Ares the greek god of War. Is that why Huffer always goes face?

Simple one for me. My name is Thierry and way back when (might have been Battlefield 1942 or Battlefield 2 at the time) I needed a name. I was wearing a Taz (from Tazmanian Devil) T-shirt at the same and thusly Thez was born. Sometimes I use Thezzy instead when Thez isn't available due to it being a short name and some people use TheZ (as in 'The Z') as their name as well (Thez wasn't available on HearthPwn for example).

I use multiple gamer names:

The most common one I use is 'GerritDeMan', which is also my username here and on Hearthpwn. 'Gerrit' is a Dutch name which I thought sounded funny (it isn't my real name) and 'de man' is dutch for 'the man'. I honestly have no good reason other than that I think it sounds funny.

I also sometimes use 'Een Bakje Sla' or 'Een Bakje Gerrit' or 'Gerritsla'. 'Een Bakje Sla' is Dutch for 'a small tray/bowl of salad'. I came up with it once when I wanted to just have a really dumb username. Sometimes I combine it with 'Gerrit' to form 'Een Bakje Gerrit' or 'Gerritsla' (explained above) just because I can.

My oldest username that I don't use a lot anymore is 'Wolto10'. Wolto is a weird alteration of my real name (Wouter) which someone at school once said to me I believe, and I was 10 years old at the time so there you go.

I became Sunbleached Angel about 10 years ago when I became brony for courple of years and was making an OC and was choosing a name for it, I took Sunbleached from some episode of Sponge bob and was choosing between angel and demon and just thought angel makes more sense. Using it ever since

I became EaterOfDays in 1999. I used to play a game called Counter-Strike. We loved a server that the admin clan was the Time-Wasters and they liked the ban hammer A LOT! Well one day we decided to troll them and became the OverTimers I was EaterOfVacations. I WAS ON MY A GAME THAT NIGHT. Changed it to Days and just kept it.

FUN FACT: Became a MTG card, I'd quit long before but someone later in life asked if it was based off that card.

Mine comes from my first character I played in WoW.
Loved the char and the name so hey why not :)
She will always have a special place

I needed a name for a character in WoW and i couldn't think of any that I would actually like. Then I decided to chose something from a HS quote and since I loved C'Thun as a card and his quote "My dreaming ends... Your nightmare begins" was my favourite from the whole game, my first character's name became 'MrNightmare'. The name 'YourNightmare' was my first idea but it would be too long and it doesn't look like a legendary champion's name at all

My mate had a irrational fear of pigeons so I named myself a pigeon just to annoy him whenever we played together

When I played Dota 2, I used to make some kind of joke with my name picture, and things I said in voice chat. So when I was thinking of my next cosplay, I thought the name Darteezy out. I considered it to be absolutely hilarious. I made myself look extremely stupid, as there is a well-known player "Arteezy", who was something like Kripp to Hearthstone. So I added a "D" in front of it. It caused tons of cringy moments, so I stook with it. I still find it somewhat funny. (Think UNIRONICALLY naming yourself something like DisguisedToad, I guess)

I like SMOrcing. And I do it a lot.

I actually chose it when tempo/ secret mage was the most popular archetype while I mainly played control and optimistically hoped that my username might force a bad mulligan or two out of my opponents lol. Plus, SMOrc is a sweet emote

Mine is a mixture of my surnames, I'm spanish but I merged my two surnames after translating them to english and latin, getting Woodcaster, in fact my current name is Engel Woodcaster.

Mine is a boring story but people always ask.  I used to be a big fan of the Big Bang Theory.  So for while my username was the Roomate Agreement.  My troubles with spelling and my youth meet that I did not realize I had spelled roommate wrong.  People shorted my name to Roomate in voice chat so it just stuck.  I now keep it spelled wrong because I have always had it like that.

Do you guys heard about roleplaying forums? I don't know if there is something like this in english speaking web, but in russian speaking part it is sort of hobby and sort of art. I had a character named Timofey Voronov and looked like this guy from Blood Lad. "Voron"(ворон) means raven. So here i am as TimonRaven.

Goliath the Dwarf is the username I have for most of my online accounts these days. It originates from a play I was in of Narnia where I was the dwarf sidekick to the White Witch, but the character didn't have an actual name. The girl who was playing the witch jokingly suggested I should pick Goliath for the sake of irony, and I thought that was a good idea. Also, I had a crush on her so anything she said sounded like a good idea back then, lol. When my brother introduced me to Steam, I choose it as my username and just kind of kept going with it for the sake of consistency. If I ever manage to get into DnD or WoW rollplay, Goliath the Dwarf will end up getting much more fleshed out as a character. 

I love how whomever posted this, stopped caring about the answers like 10 posts in :D 

it's like "meh, I didn't think this would be as popular, cba to keep acknowledging these replies" hahahaha. 

Horus been my gametag since early Diablo2 days, when my B.net account was created.
At the time, I was also playing some Warhammer 40k and always had a thing for baddies.
After using this name on one too many game, it just stucked to me, plus it has a goddly ring to it!

My IGN used to be Sabido everywhere (still is whenever I start a Pokémon fan-made game). However, after the 2010 World Cup, where Portugal (where I'm from) lost to Spain, and after a friend of mine convinced me to start playing League of Legends, I made an account with Sabido and, when they asked me for my summoner name (why we need an account name and a different summoner name baffles me) I remembered how salty my friend was after that game (he takes the whole Portugal-Spain rivalry way too seriously), so I "spain-ianized" my IGN from Sabido to El Sabidón. Sadly, HS or this forum/HPwn don't allow spaces in the nicknames, nor do they allow for the ´ symbol, so I use ElSabidon in that scenario.

Back in the days of Starcraft (before broodwar) and Warcraft II battlenet edition I was -EF-Hydralisk. EF stands for Clan Elite Force. It was an amazing clan that I had so much fun being in. I have had this name for 20 years now. Probably will never change it!

Quote From Horus

Horus been my gametag since early Diablo2 days, when my B.net account was created.
At the time, I was also playing some Warhammer 40k and always had a thing for baddies.
After using this name on one too many game, it just stucked to me, plus it has a goddly ring to it!

I prefer Mortarion from the primarch's. Nurgle was always my favourite Chaos God.

Night Goblins are my favourite overall race from the entire warhammer Universe though. Also Skaven are great in the books, really funny. I like Undead as well. But the proper Old School WHFB undead was the best.

Nurgle is my favourite in 40k though by a long way though, especially when it comes to making armies as the customization you could do was like no other race. you could get any marnies and just convert them with a scalpel, bits from other kits and green stuff mainly.

I'm talking before they had all those new plastic kits, there were not a lot of options so you had to make your own stuff. Made for very interesting model building/painting as you would be buying boxes of fantasy stuff to use parts of in 40k, loads of zombie bits and that.

I remember making scythes as well with a stretched out paperclip, green stuff'ed the handle then used a re-purposed scything talon from a genestealer for the blade. using green stuff to tie it all together, you'd have never known where the blade came from, looked legit. ha ha. 

Horus is cool though. Still got a poster of him and the Emperor's last battle somewhere. 

I'm a weeb :D Around seven years ago I watched Bleach and really liked the name of one of the weapons, Suzumebachi, I keep using it or some variation of it in every game I play

Well, my irl name is Jim and there is that one guy from WoW

I picked this one around 20 years ago, God knows for what forum it was.

The simple explanation of it is... Well, I'm an edgy guy who is always ready to defend his lines (my principles) and his angles (the things I believe in, the way I see the world).

I'm also a professional graphic and web designer. My job requires me to create 3D renders for my clients from time to time too. I believe it fits me really well.

League of legends name selector, I had this word "summoner" in front of me, "your summoner name" tried many names they all were taken.. good thing I landed up on this name cause even now 7 years later I think this name is cool and I main Shaco in league which is a champion which has a cloning ability so it's fitting to me, and I always thought of it as a person who brings more potential into the game by having the ability to do stuff twice.

Kept using it on other games as well and just kept using it now it's my name in every gaming environment I join.. I know it's a yugioh card which is actually one of the cards I liked the most, since it bends such a basic rule of being able to normal summon an additional monster this turn, I am not longer a follower of the yu gi oh franchise (Although is is the main reason I started playing HS) but I still appreciate the card and I was well aware when choosing my name, and some people DID mention it over the years.

for people who don't know the card:

https://yugioh.fandom.com/wiki/Double_Summon

Quote From Zuljim

Well, my irl name is Jim and there is that one guy from WoW

My Troll Affliction-Lock in WoW is called Null'jin (well without the apostrophe as you can't have those in WoW) 

My username on Hearthstone was simply one that was randomly generated when I registered.  

My username here is from Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive series. 

My username on Steam was a stupid play on words I made up because I didn't like my old name.  

My reddit name is taken from the name of a Sufjan Stevens album.

OP: cool thread - it was fun to read through so far! I got mine because I used to build up 80's Japanese sports cars around the same time that the Fast & Furious franchise started (I'm forty this year). I was building an S13 Silvia here, stateside, and when I was doing the JDM front end conversion, I replaced the factory battery and battery support brackets with a much smaller unit and held it in place with......... metal bookends from Walmart. My friend Mike never let me live it down and I've been going by "bookends" or "BookendS" ever since!

From my childhood.  Good old times

When I first started gaming I am really bad at names and had a tough time thinking of one.

I can’t remember which game but when I needed a name for one all I could think about was the documentary on space I had seen the night before.  

They were talking about the explosions that might have created the supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies and they were much bigger than supernovae and they were calling them hyper-novae. And they were referred to as the most destructive thing in the universe.

So singular is Hyper Nova and I though the most destructive thing in the universe was an apt name for a gamer and it stuck ever since. 

Way back when Maplestory was new and relatively popular, my friends and I signed up and played it together for about a year. After that, they slowly started leaving the game one by one, until I was basically playing it alone - which ended up causing me to take a break from the game as well.

About 2-3 years down the line, I got bored and decided to get back to the game. Problem was I couldn't remember my old account info and had to start a new one. I was in no mood to think of a creative name so I just decided that since the beginner mobs are snails - I would be the snail killer. That was taken and Snailblood was the next best thing.

After that - all my account names have snail-related bits to them.

i just like sectional sofa's that also belong to various victim groups on the inter-sectional hierarchy.....  Pretty simple actually.

I went through a phase of calling my WoW toons after Hull city players and Bullard (after Jimmy Bullard) was my main. I just ported it over when I started playing Hearthstone

From Liriel Baenre - Forgotten Realms :) Not only in HS, but on several other sites as well.

Basically same situation as yours. Mine was a randomly generated name for my main toon which is a hunter. It just kind of stuck and has become "me".

My name is based off the first email account I made when I was little. I've been using variants of it ever since (Joey Jojo, Joseph Jojo, Jose Phjojo, sometimes with _ and usually with 48 at the end). The name itself is an obscure Simpsons reference.

This commercial: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_349WJ37lAA

In other games I use the name “The Archivist” or “The4rchivist”because I generally like to collect all the things and dive into the lore.

For my forsaken warlock. Ivy for poison ivy and doom for my favourite music genre. I invented emo, yes.

Nearly 20 years later (wow, how time flies...) Valkyrie Profile remains one of the best games I've ever played. Also as a I found out later, the mythological Arngrim was apparently a badass with a magic sword, so that's always nice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arngrim

Cheese has been my favorite food since I was three and I'm terrible at naming things so it was my first gamer tag and has stayed. Although my first WOW character was Sephirra and I should probably use that instead. 

I have a couple of names I use a lot, huwuno and Shiny. The latter I earned by being well presented/wearing ironed clothes in a social circle of scruffy punks. It's my RL nickname and what most people in my hometown call me. Huwuno is the title of Welsh punk band Mclusky's debut single when they were called Best. Mclusky later rerecorded it re-titled Whoyouknow.

A band I like a lot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2RUBo2zFr0

High school nickname that stuck.

I literally just use my first name, though in cases where that's not available, I usually do something related to Sylveon because that's my favorite Pokémon.

I actually have a fun origin story for mine, and it started coincidentally with hearthstone. So I had some stupid random username I used for everything: "Londah", including my Battle.net. One day I wanted to create a new fresh account to play Hearthstone, but I wanted to use the same name Londah. My solution for that was to change my account's name from Londah to ContaVelha ("OldAccount" in my language), and make my new one be Londah (This happened one more time, birthing ContaVelha02). With time I decided to go back to my old account and liked the idea of being called "OldAccount02", it just sounds stupid. I've been using it for everything ever since, RIP Londah.

Mine came to me because I'm a huge Star Wars fan and I can be sarcastic as hell.

mine is because i've been seeing more jade decks pop up which really made me happy cause i love the jade archetype and consistently play jade rogue myself

I used to love the Dragonlance book series when I was a kid. When I started playing Hearthstone, the classes I liked most were warlock and warrior, who put me in mind of Raistlin and Caramon Majere, the dark mage and warrior who were brothers in the series. So, Majere.

I wanted something vaguely ancient Greek sounding for this awesome game called TitanQuest, and this was the best I could come up with.

Quote From cuekillar

My identity is a really old one. It came from my early days playing yahoo pool. These days I prefer to go by Cue but it's usually always taken or whatever platform I'm signing up to needs 4 or more characters minimum so I just go for the full name cue killar. Geez I've been called this for over 20 years now D:  I feel so old now! 

Now you made me remember Yahoo pool...I used to love playing that (from another old guy apparently)

Quote From Skarsnik

My GT Is Nurgles Socks. (which is a name I created especially for Hearthstone, but is now my name in WoW and D3 and stuff as well as they all share 1 name. I typically choose a different name on each platform, so I'm something else on steam and then something else on Xbox live and again for PSN)

I just go by the name "Nurgz" mostly though for short. (at least in WoW where I actually have friends anyway)

The name basically came about because Nurgle is the God of Pestilence in Warhammer, so it's pretty filthy. Now there was this TV show in the UK called "The Young Ones" from the 70's and there's this bit where the character "Vivian" has sentient socks because they are that dirty. They basically come to life and start to terrorize the other house-mates in the show. 

So I came up with the idea for a character that was basically the God Nurgles Socks that in the same vein as Vivian's Socks, had became sentient and were playing Hearthstone. So the idea is that if you are playing against me, you're actually playing against a sentient pair of socks once owned by the God of pestilence. 


You asked. Ha, Ha.

Now that had some thought behind it...nice

I like this thread too...fun so see all the places people pull from.

Mine comes from a long-held misunderstanding I had as a child. When I first learned the alphabet song (not sure if this is unique to the US), I thought L-M-N-O was one letter since the song smushes them all together. I started using Elemenope to put the P in there too, but I found it wasn’t easily pronounceable, so I shortened to Elemeno. 

BTW, I always extend the phrasing when I sing the song to my kids to make sure they don’t make the same mistake I did ;

Well, my OOC Name comes from my time playing World of Warcraft - i played a Gnome Mage and i wanted a funny yet a little mischievous but still silly sounding name and therefore FieselFitz was born :)

Cause Fies is a german (mother language) word for evil and Fitz is another word you can use for Family or little - sure there are other Platforms like Xbox Live i have other usernames but on Forums and stuff i mostly use FieselFitz :)

Quote From Majere

I used to love the Dragonlance book series when I was a kid. When I started playing Hearthstone, the classes I liked most were warlock and warrior, who put me in mind of Raistlin and Caramon Majere, the dark mage and warrior who were brothers in the series. So, Majere.

Aha unreal. Great choice! Mine has been variations of Gnimsh, also from Dragonlance. Hence, Gn1m

Me and my best friend loved computer systems back in the day. After some joking around we made some tags for each other. He came up with my name "Marco" mixed with "MAC OS X". it was kinda catchy and i still use it mostly everywhere since then.

Ever since I was a kid, I've always enjoyed playing RPGs and I wanted to give my characters a proper, cool sounding name. I randomly fixxed on ковачът, which in Bulgarian means "the forger".

I had a name..old starcraft account.

At some point, not sure when, blizzard assigned everyone random account names, told you to then change it to what you wanted.

They gave me KFC..and it made me chuckle..so, that's my name, now.

Anyone remember when that happened?

I was with some friends, and a girl that one of them had been sleeping with called me for some reason (she and I were just friends). It was a really weird conversation, and when I got off the phone I said "Well, that was stilted and awkward." Stilted + Awkward became Stawkward became Stockworth. I'm still pretty awkward, but my wife finds it charming

Quote From Majere

I used to love the Dragonlance book series when I was a kid. When I started playing Hearthstone, the classes I liked most were warlock and warrior, who put me in mind of Raistlin and Caramon Majere, the dark mage and warrior who were brothers in the series. So, Majere.

I love this! I loved the Dragonlance books when I was younger. Raistlin was my favorite character. I especially loved the trilogy that focused on the twins.