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As much as I love the LucasArts racing game Star Wars Episode 1: Racer, there's one thing that has always bugged me about it: the name.
This may be a personal preference at work, but it always sounded a little clunky to me, on account of the developers lobbing off the "pod" part of the subtitle.
As a kid, in fact, I remember almost exclusively referring to it to friends as Episode 1: Podracer, and later had to consciously retrain my brain to match the official title when I started writing about games for a living, to avoid strangers constantly pointing out the error. Because of this, I've always wondered why the team didn't just call their game Podracer in the first place, as I'm guessing I'm not the only one who defaulted to this nickname based on the game's subject matter.
Previously, I'd read in Rob Smith's book Rogue Leaders: The Story of LucasArts that this might have had something to do with another company using the name "POD" in a title, but it wasn't made clear which game was responsible for scaring LucasArts off the name.
Naturally, if you're someone who has an encyclopedic knowledge of late '90s racing games or access to the internet, it's pretty easy to guess, but recently, as part of a roundtable-style interview with Episode 1: Racer's creative leads, I finally got to hear the story firsthand from Jon Knoles, who admitted some on the team weren't exactly thrilled with having to compromise and confirmed the title of the game in question.
"We did want to call it Star Wars Episode 1: Podracer, but there was a company, I think it was Ubisoft, that had released a game earlier called POD," Knoles told me. "And I believe the folks at LucasArts felt it was best to go in another direction."
POD, or P.O.D: Planet of Death, in case you're unfamiliar, was a Ubi Soft futuristic PC racing game from 1997, which saw players souping up cars and racing across one of Jupiter's moons. It was one of the first games to support Intel's MMX instruction set and was even teased for the N64 at one point (though this version was ultimately cancelled).
More importantly, for the topic at hand, it led Ubi Soft to file a trademark for the word "POD" in 1996 for "interactive video and computer software for auto racing games" — a trademark the company held in the US until 2004. This inevitably convinced LucasArts lawyers that there might be problems if they decided to market their game under the name "Podracer".
As Knoles recalls, there was no legal threat from Ubi Soft as far as he was aware; LucasArts' lawyers simply noticed the trademark, with the team, therefore, having to switch to the slightly more boring "Racer" title.
POD would later have a sequel, POD 2, for the Dreamcast in 2000, and has also been rereleased on PC via GOG as POD: Gold.