Well, Electronic Arts made it official last week: Need for Speed Shift 2: Unleashed will now be known as Shift 2: Unleashed. Thank goodness, eh?

Actually, I argued that they should’ve untethered -- or perhaps “unleashed” -- the original Shift from the Need for Speed franchise back in 2009. Why? Because the name couldn’t possibly do it any favors. EA wanted Shift to stomp a foot into the racing-simulator territory currently held by Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport...franchises that are incredibly well-defined. Grab a random Need for Speed game off a store shelf, and you might end up with a hardcore racer, a smash-em-up joyride, an open-world adventure -- it’s all good to Need for Speed.

My morning commute looks like this.

So nothing specifically made Shift a Need for Speed game; specificity isn't a series hallmark. But the brand and its associated reputation for hit-or-miss quality hurt Shift commercially. Across all platforms, it moved over 4 million units...not bad. Matched up against its direct rival, Need for Speed Shift sold roughly half what the Xbox 360-exclusive Forza Motorsport 3 did.

Oh yeah. There’s a lot in a name.

For example, I suspect Halo: Combat Evolved might've faired differently had Bungie kept its original title: Solipsis. They also briefly (though perhaps not seriously) threw around The Crystal Palace, Hard Vacuum, Star Maker, Star Shield, and The Santa Machine. And while Blam! (another discard) deserves to be used one day, their final choice fit the game perfectly. It's short, sweet, looks good on a t-shirt, and evokes the game's religious overtones without being too obvious about it.

On the other hand, I checked out I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES 1N IT!!!1 based solely on the sheer stupidity of its title. Dragon Age: Origins tells you everything he need to know, but Enslaved: Odyssey to the West sounded like I'd spend eight hours toting Cleopatra around on her palanquin, punctuated by the occasional whipping.

I know what you're thinking. Did I fire a million bullets or only 950,000?

A name sets up certain expectations...good, bad, or neutral. A franchise trades on the reputation surrounding its name. If Tom Clancy's on the box, you know what that game is. Virtually every Legend of Zelda installment arrives courtesy of a different creative team, but fans still buy in because it's a Zelda game. Similarly, Activision bopped the Call of Duty brand around between developers without thinking too much about it because the games performed solidly. Then Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare turned a successful series into a billion-dollar monster.

At no point did anyone at Activision plan to call the sequel Call of Duty 5. For a while, they weren't even going to keep "Call of Duty" in the title.

They knew the loyalty -- and the money -- would follow the Modern Warfare imprint created by developer Infinity Ward, so they wisely let the imprint take over the chronology. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 sold through the roof and even transferred fame back to the mother franchise. The very next game in the chain, Call of Duty: Black Ops, also broke sales records...something its developer, Treyarch, never did before in all its years cranking out Call of Duty games. Odds are they've already gotten the directive to make Black Ops 2.

Ima be William Tellin' that bitch!

That's a successful approach, if a little risky. Too many name games spread across too many products can dilute the entire brand.

Command & Conquer successfully split itself off into separate storylines, all hung on the same basic gameplay, but Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam sounds like a franchise hopelessly stuck in its own imprint. Vietnam has nothing to do with the original Bad Company squad of screw-ups and, unless you count game mechanics, it isn't even a remote sequel to Bad Company 2. What "Battlefield: Vietnam" has in accuracy it apparently lacks in salability. They can recycle that money phrase -- Bad Company 2 -- over the next dozen games just like Street Fighter 2 did, but eventually the name will mean nothing.

That's what happened to Need for Speed. And that's why EA made a very smart move in dropping the brand from Shift 2. Now Shift can stand on its own merits and make a name for itself. That's a chance every game deserves.