Scroungin' 4 Catsup: Origins

Years ago, easily over a decade, I was a member of a web forum that ran a contest wherein the winners would get to change the losers' screen names to a new name of their choosing. I'm unsure what the contest involved as I didn't participate - in fact, I only found out about it afterwards when I was trying to figure out why all of these people I recognized had different handles - but for some reason the thought "'Scroungin' 4 Catsup' would be a funny screen name to give somebody" popped into my head. To this day I can't explain why that exact combination of words occurred to me, but they would go on to define my very existence...

In 2019 I decided to take game development a little more seriously. I had been working on my game Pitch and Putt Club for a while and knew it would be finished soon. At this point I was aiming for the big time, I was going to take the world by storm, and I figured that becoming a big respectable figurehead of the gaming scene required a studio name.

The first studio name I thought of was "Split Ship Interactive". This is a name I had in mind since I was around 14 years old. As a kid I had a mild obsession with the Titanic, and the Titanic split in half, and it was a ship, and the games I would make were going to be interactive. Ergo, "Split Ship Interactive". The logo would have been a ship split in half, with "Split" on the stern and "Ship" on the bow ahd "Interactive" underneath. I put a lot of thought into this logo, and no thought into actually making games; I didn't make my first real game until I was 26 years old. Ultimately and thankfully, this name was abandoned after finding out there was a company in Croatia called "Split Ship Management". My creativity would have been called into question had I used a name that someone else also used, you see, even if we were part of two completely different industries (rhyme not intentional but very cool).

The next name I came up with, that was thought of in 2019 and not when I was a freshman in high school, was Big S.O.W., which stood for Big Sense of Wonder. The logo was going to be a pig staring up into the sky with a look of awe on its face. Get it? I'm unsure why I abandoned this name, there was either an existing games studio using it or I was scared off by the Tokyo Game Show having something called "Sense of Wonder Night". Regardless, I'm glad I didn't use it too.

And then I remembered the name it would have been funny to give somebody else if they lost a contest: "Scroungin' 4 Catsup." I waffled on using it: Too goofy. Nobody would take me seriously. But I must have decided to get over myself, because you're reading the blog on the website of the game developer Scroungin' 4 Catsup. Hobbyist, experimental, non-professional game developer Scroungin' 4 Catsup. Scroungin' 4 Catsup, which isn't a studio name but rather a moniker. I'm just one person.

So there you have it. I'm called Scroungin' 4 Catsup because it's a funny name that randomly popped into my head in my mid-20s and I didn't like the more "serious" names I was considering. No deeper meaning than that. Sorry to disappoint!