God of War's Kratos almost went by a different name, but developers at Santa Monica Studio made too many Domino's pizza jokes. David Jaffe, the director of the original God of War trilogy, recently put out a video explaining the deep dish issue.
Originally, Kratos was called “Dominus,” which Jaffe liked because it made him sound dominant and strong. Unfortunately, it also made him sound like a chain of pizza restaurants.
“The people on the team started making Domino’s Pizza jokes,” Jaffe said. “Every single time someone said Dominus, someone inevitably would yell out, ‘30 minutes or free,’ or, ‘Get the door, it’s Dominus.’
“After about the 50th time, the writing was on the wall. Dominus was dead and we needed a new name for our hero.”
Someone at the studio printed out a big list of Ancient Greek baby names and Jaffe went through with a yellow highlighter marking the best ones. “The names that I highlighted were not great,” he said, pointing at Julius, Parthenius, and Maksym as examples.
“Nothing felt just right. Eventually, our marketing lead, Susan Panico, was the one who came up with the name Kratos. She pitched it and we loved it, and it stuck.”
Jaffe found the list of highlighted baby names among his old design documents last year. On the sheet, hidden among the names, unhighlighted, there it was: Kratos.
“We had Sony’s biggest franchise hero in our hands the entire time and we didn’t even know it,” he said. “Which I guess goes to show you how much of success in games is just luck, timing, and, in this case, marketing.”
Jaffe has previously talked about Dominus and the creation of Kratos, but he’s never gone into this much detail about the process. He previously just said that marketing didn’t like Dominus, but the pizza stuff is certainly a new development.
God of War's first release was the 2005 PS2 game of the same name. It was a big hit, spawning a franchise that has seen significant success over the past 20 years. The next game in the series, God of War: Laufey, is due out on PS5 in February 2027. Santa Monica Studio head of creative Cory Barlog has confirmed that an untitled new God of War game with Kratos back as the protagonist is also in development.