Posted on March 31, 2012 by RevStu

If your fingers exert even the slightest amount of pressure on the pulse of the mobile-gaming zeitgeist, the image below is going to set your deja-vu-sense a-tingling.

If there's one thing you can't accuse App Store developers of, it's being slow to rip off a success story. In this case, the success story in question is the astonishing overnight smash-hit Draw Something, which exploded into the news so dramatically that notorious idea-pirates Zynga (the same company who shamelessly cloned Tiny Tower) actually opted to pay a rumoured $210m for the company who made it rather than just banging out their own hasty barefaced knock-off like they usually would.

The game in our picture is functionally all but identical to Draw Something, except with more features. You get extra drawing tools and lots more colours to play with, and there are extra game modes on top of the straightforward turn-based picture exchange of OMGPOP's No.1 phenomenon. (Which in fact barely qualifies as a "game" at all, but that's another feature entirely.) The funny thing, though, is that it ISN'T a knock-off.

It's a game that came out two months BEFORE Draw Something, is basically exactly the same but superior to it in almost every way, yet has conspicuously failed to earn so much money that its bewildered creators can do little but giggle all day at their insane good fortune. Why? Well, of course we can't say for absolute certain. But we'd be happy to wager a pretty substantial amount of money on the fact that some complete dogturd-brained demi-wit decided to lumber it with the name Charadium II.

Names are important, and there can have been fewer more striking examples of that fact in living memory. "Draw Something" is a brilliant name – descriptive, snappy and memorable. Tell someone about it and even if they don't have their phone on them at the time there's pretty much no chance they'll have forgotten it by the time they get home. In contrast, the only way "Charadium II" could have been more offputtingly titled to its intended target audience would have been if they'd chosen to call it "&–++==GrwIxyn0rXX!!__29987 (ev^&%^4): Part XVIIX5 – The Fwhargnolaz Doctrine".

What does "charadium" mean? It means nothing, and if you were to take a wild stab based on the name alone and the clue that it was some sort of parlour game, you'd assume it was something to do with Charades, not what it actually is (ie Pictionary). The "-dium" on the end makes it sound pompous and overblown for good measure.

We're not sure why they've gone with the "II" suffix at all (since people don't like feeling that they're late joining in with something), as there's no Charadium I on the App Store and the game just calls itself "Charadium" onscreen, but the choice of Roman numerals has for decades now been cultural shorthand for "the creators of this artefact are almost certainly wankers far more interested in Lord Of The Rings than is healthy for a grown adult", and therefore hammers the last nail into the coffin.

Frankly, they'd have had more chance of success if they'd released a game called "Buy This And You'll Definitely Get Cancer".

People often don't believe us when we tell them videogame publishers are cretins. We can think of a couple of hundred million brand-new reasons that prove we're right.

EDIT: We've been poking around a little, and it looks like the first Charadium – which was even MORE similar to Draw Something, leading us to stroke our chin thoughtfully – was in fact available for iOS over two YEARS ago, in December 2009, but was pulled for unknown reasons in early April 2010. It was replaced by a Pro version, which lasted until August the same year before also vanishing. Possibly they didn't think they'd made the name quite awful enough yet.

