Because in Slavic languages "czarn", "chern", "chorn" etc. is usually about something being black. "Czarne" is Polish for "black", also the "chern" in "Chernobyl" means black, or for instance the Russian and Ukrainian names of the Black Sea are transcribed as "Chornoye morye" and "Chorne more". In fact "Charnus" sounds almost like a certain Polish slur for black people ("czarnuch", which basically translates as the n-word).

That's pretty good. I don't speak Slavic so I that association doesn't occur to me, but it evokes the word "charnel" (Collins English Dictionary: ghastly; sepulchral; deathly).

Incidentally, I was just reminiscing about Sacrifice before entering this thread. In Sacrifice Charnel is the cruel god of slaughter and death.

The "black" angle also works though. Reference to blackness or darkness is often used to make an Evil Overlord's name more intimidating, and "char" happens to be the English word meaning to blacken by burning. "Darth Charnus" is badass,

It was brought up on an episode of Extra Credits (and I've seen it also mentioned in other books I've read about the history of the video games industry), that a fair amount of people in the gaming industry - especially in the upper management levels but also at the design level - are people who either come from the film industry, or are people who couldn't make it into film directly and see video games as their "backdoor" to getting into the film industry. Coupled with that is the long-running perception of the video games industry chasing after (and emulating) Hollywood to gain legitimacy with mainstream audiences.

Along with game budgets for AAA releases spiralling upwards and examples of franchises like COD, Halo or GoW matching (or even exceeding) Hollywood blockbusters and it's no surprise that more and more times games development is thought of like film development, even though the two are vastly different.

Sidious isn't that bad..
Darth (in)Vader
Darth (in)Sidious.
I kind of liked that...

Insanius is OK. I could see it working.

Icky, on the other hand...

The original Star Wars trilogy script was heavily edited. Empire Strikes Back was largely rewritten from what Lucas had. He was always a better worldbuilder than scriptwriter.

Somewhere along the way he decided to ignore other opinions, and that's how we got the prequel trilogy and what happened to LucasArts.

George Lucas has more issues than Time Magazine.

It's nothing fancy or latin-sounding, but a would-be hero would think twice before going up against Darth Mental.

Darth Dredd, sadly, was nixed by legal.

Might as well use "Darth Bad Guy" or "Darth Evil" in case Lucas' other ideas were too subtle. ;)

How come I didn't see anything about Darth Meannie yet ? :)

Very interesting article :)

Depressing but interesting.

Or Darth Minnie! :p

But there is a Darth Goofy.

That article was pretty good. It's a shame what happened to that company.

Does anyone remember Outlaws? That was a really great LucasArts game.

Absolutely remember Outlaws! I mean, I didn't play it, but I remember reading about the game and seeing ads in magazines. Seemed like a fun shooter set in the Wild Wild West.

The very famous video with the eared Darth Vader just made me thought of this (saw it very recently). This is great parody material, the "darth princess" that vader marries at the end, once he became good again ....

Then, the picture you posted ... given Mr Lucas' face I have to ask : is it "cooked" ? Because he sure looks like someone who just sold his soul in my opinion (it may be his normal look and I may be projecting though).