Crowd Control Productions (CCP Games) was founded in 1997 in Reykjavik, Iceland. It is best known for EVE Online, its anarchic space MMO from which stories of intricately-plotted depravity emerge on a disturbingly but entertainingly regular basis. It has over 150 employees.
The Communist Party of China was founded in 1921 in Shanghai, China, by Chinese intellectual supporters of the then-recent October Revolution. It was victorious in a civil war against the Guomindang—Chinese Nationalist Party—and has governed the People’s Republic of China since 1949. It has over 100 million members.
In a recent chat with GamesIndustry.biz, CCP—sorry, Fenris Creations CEO Hilmar Pétursson said that, yeah, the company pretty much took the opportunity to change its name because it was sick of all the Chinese Communist Party gags and misunderstandings.
“I’m not going to fight the Chinese Communist Party over who is the CCP,” Pétursson said, wisely (China maintains over 600 nuclear warheads). And besides, “in the English-speaking world, we have increasingly had problems… reporters write stories about us where we are literally referred to as ‘the other CCP’. We have CCP employees going to the US and being questioned over the name. These are not big things, but I can sense where this is going.”
I am almost certainly one of the reporters who made that joke, so sorry about that one, guys. But it’s also a slightly dispiriting indicator of the state of the world that company employees were getting the third-degree over its name at US border control.
In fact, Pétursson notes the mix-up between CCP (videogames) and CCP (vanguard of the proletarian revolution) is pretty much entirely a western phenomenon: “Obviously, the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t think of itself as the CCP. That’s a Western construct. They refer to it by a Chinese name. They’re not called the Chinese Communist Party in Iceland either; we call it the Kommúnistaflokkur Kína in Icelandic.”
So, our fault again. Still, at least it’s all in the past now. At least unless and until Xi Jinping announces the funniest brand pivot in history at the next party congress.
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