Gallery: Mario ... Or Am I? Videogame Anagrams Hide Secret Messages
01skyward-sword
Anagrams were once thought to possess mystical powers, the ability to divine hidden secrets. Today we understand that this is not true, except possibly in the case of videogames. For the past few years, posters on the NeoGAF gaming message board have tried their hand at creating anagram photoshops: Manipulated images of videogame box covers with the letters shifted around into a different phrase. The box is then altered to reflect the new title: [Metal Gear becomes "A Telegram";](http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=25586916&postcount=93) [Super Mario Galaxy becomes "Marsupial Axe Orgy."](http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=25584732&postcount=43) Many of the denizens of NeoGAF have whiled away the hours working up similarly amusing, if nonsensical, photoshops. But [a poster by the handle of "Jarosh"](http://www.twitter.com/jaroshbarksdale) has continually set himself apart from his fellow forum-dwellers with images that use anagrams to offer commentary on the games in question. To use the example above, players irritated by the constant text-only chattering of your ever-present companion in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword might have described their experience as "Dazed! Legend of Words: Talky Shrew." "When you find an interesting anagram, it can feel like you've discovered something that was hidden all along, something that was in a way begging to be found," said Jarosh (who prefers to go simply by his handle) in an email. "If it also happens to be a mini-review of a game, it makes you feel like an explorer who's just discovered a sunken treasure." Below, we've presented a gallery of Jarosh's greatest anagram reviews, as well as the word wizard's top tips for teasing out the best phrases and creating a lookalike logo.
02skyrim-2
The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim ------------------------- Millions of people love Skyrim, but it's no secret that the massive RPG is full of bugs, especially the PlayStation 3 version. The anagram lays the blame right at the feet of the game's developers: "Sly Dicks: Sell Them Error." In case that didn't put fine enough a point on it, check out the Bethesda logo, which now reads "Beta Shed." Jarosh is quick to point out that he doesn't exactly sit by lamplight with a pencil and paper rearranging letters. Instead, he uses [online anagram generators](http://www.wordsmith.org/anagram/) to spit out lists of words. But that's where the work begins. "Rarely do you actually get lucky and they spit something useful out on the first try," he said. "I spent hours isolating or forcing words and expressions manually." "When I was working on the Skyrim one, I had some amazing almost-anagrams," he said. "There's stuff in there like 'Old Tech Sells' or 'Sly Tech Redress,' but at the end of the day I had to go with something simpler because I just couldn't do anything with the leftover letters."
03saints-row
Saints Row The Third -------------------- Is it just a coincidence that the name of this open-world action game, in which much of the player's time is spent driving ridiculous vehicles and causing mayhem in a big city, anagrams to "Ride Shit, Trash Town?" Probably, considering that by Wordsmith's reckoning, "Saints Row The Third" anagrams to about 88,000 different sets of words. Some of the automatic ones would themselves be ripe for moderately amusing images from lesser humorists: "North Dishwater Tits," "Throw Strained Shit." "You can get hundreds of thousands of results with a generator," Jarosh said. "It's best to immediately try to isolate words that sound like they could be used to describe the game in question and then force these in the generator."
04metroid-2
Metroid: Other M ---------------- I liked Nintendo's novel story-heavy take on the Metroid series, but many players were less than impressed, thinking that they would rather have had the game developed by Retro Studios, which created the universally acclaimed Metroid Prime. In other words: "Meh: Mod It, Retro!" "For image manipulation, I use Photoshop CS5," said Jarosh. "I try very hard to re-create the original fonts on the box art including any effects, gradients, outlines, embossing, shadows, distress etc. You can try to find the font in question by [uploading a sample image to WhatTheFont](http://new.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/). I do this a lot."
05red-faction
Red Faction: Guerilla --------------------- The best part about this game was running wild with a sledgehammer and smashing every one of the destructible buildings, to the point that "Rage Fit: Ruin All Décor" is almost a better title. Creating a logo that looks like the original game’s is the biggest Photoshop challenge. ”If you’re lucky, you can cut out individual letters and piece them back into place,” Jarosh says. “But usually you have to re-create the title completely.” Jarosh says he frequently re-creates the entire box art piece by piece instead of trying to erase the original logo. ”Sometimes you can find concept art that is also used on the box art, but without logos and text, on the next,” he says. “While you can try to clone out the original title, if you have very complex backgrounds this can get quite difficult.”
06bioshock-3
BioShock -------- The rest of these images aren't commentary on the games, just amusing coincidences that lent themselves well to funny box art spoofs. "If you just want to make something silly and not something that's necessarily a commentary on the game in question, you should focus on games with shorter names," Jarosh said.
07epic-mickey
Disney Epic Mickey ------------------ To create this ribald image, Jarosh first had to break a personal rule. "Most of the time, just stringing together synonyms for sexual organs or piecing together awkward sentences with hilariously juvenile swear words isn't funny enough," he said. "Although I admit I have once not been able to resist a dick joke myself."
08zack-and-wiki
Zack and Wiki: Quest For Barbaros' Treasure ------------------------------------------- You may not be able to recall the full title of Capcom's early puzzle game for Wii, but it may prove difficult to get "Wack Nazi Kid: Foursquare Breasts Aborter" out of your head. Even if it doesn't mean much of anything.
09fear
F.E.A.R. -------- The important thing to remember about anagramming game titles is that there are plenty of funny words and phrases that anagram generators would never spit out automatically. "Earf," on its own, means absolutely nothing -- unless it has the context of Will Smith [uttering his famous line from Independence Day](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfPWpEKhgfk).
10manhunt
Manhunt ------- Rockstar's game about serial killing is scary, but for some people the memories of Catholic schoolteachers who wield rulers like deadly ninja weapons may be even more frightening. The fact that "Mathnun" is just a few transposed letters away from "Manhunt" makes this even funnier. "The best anagrams are the ones that still evoke the original title when you look at them because the original name was short to begin with and because you're potentially only moving around a handful of letters," he says, "and are funny and to the point because despite being absurd they still sound like some insane marketing department or deranged indie developer could have thought them up."
