ranzware
Thanks to the benefit of hindsight, we know that Schedule 1 is a pretty cool name for the drug-dealing sim that’s topped the Steam charts these last two weeks. It’s evocative, memorable, and references its subject matter without affixing a played-out “Simulator” on the end. But five months ago, back when Schedule 1 was nothing more than a modestly popular demo, its developer was seriously worried that the name would sabotage its success.
“Am I kneecapping myself with my game’s name?” Tyler of TVGS (Tyler’s Video Game Studio) asked r/GameDev in a December 2024 post.
“I’m a bit worried that the name ‘Schedule I’ is a bit niche or vague and may be limiting my audience,” he wrote. “Most other similar games have ‘drug’, or ‘narco’ in the title. I’ve figured that if I’m going to change the name, the earlier the better.”
It’s a reasonable concern. As some well-meaning redditors pointed out in the thread at the time, “Schedule 1” is a difficult name to parse unless you already know the United States’ method for categorizing controlled substances. It’s also an SEO nightmare.
“Searching up ‘Schedule 1’ just shows primarily government documents,” user 1Darude1 noted. “I presume the intent is to be a play on those government/IRS documents, but I didn’t know what it was until I looked it up.”
Some users said not to sweat the government association, though: “When I do a search for schedule 1 on Google I get a list of toxic substances. When I search for ‘Schedule 1 game’ your game shows up as the first result. I don’t really think it’ll be that big of an issue,” wrote mxldevs.
“Seems like a solid name, but maybe I’m biased because my dad used to cook meth so I’m intimately familiar with the term,” user VegtableCulinaryTerm added, completely out of pocket.
But it was user Accomplished_Rock695 who didn’t hold back on their apprehension: “I think it’s a pretty poor name. That is very US drug law specific. It’s not going to localize well. Even within the US, most people have no idea what that means. You aren’t going to get much attention on the name itself.”
Tyler of Video Game Studio fame, who is himself Australian, responded to this one, acknowledging the knowledge gap but hoping it would work out anyway.
“Thank you—yeah it is a very US-centric term that may not translate well in other countries,” he wrote. “I think it would work once the game was well established but getting it to catch on might be a challenge.”
User RocketPoweredPope replied to the original comment with a counter I hadn’t considered: “Reminds me of another game that named itself after a US law. Some obscure game about stealing cars.”
Eventually, Tyler returned to the thread and thanked everyone for their feedback.
“Thank you everyone for the responses! It’s been genuinely very helpful. It’s a tough call, but I think for now I’m going to keep the name as it is and re-evaluate in a couple of weeks,” he wrote. “I may end up adding some sort of tagline following the title (etc ‘Schedule I: Drug Wars’) if necessary.”
That tagline would never materialize. Tyler stuck to his guns with his punchy two-word title, and it paid off. Five months later, the videogame is among the top results for Schedule 1, right next to the official sites of both the Internal Revenue Service and Drug Enforcement Agency.
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Kurt Indovina
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