Until very recently, EVE Online’s ship browser was known as the Interbus Ship Identification System—or ISIS, for short. Wuh-oh.
The browser was, of course, stamped with those four scarlet letters before terrorist organization ISIS/ISIL rose to their place of modern infamy.
For a while, the name was even abbreviated as ISIS in the game’s UI. Case in point:
However, EVE players recently logged in to find that developer CCP rechristened the game’s browser to the simpler, significantly less unfortunate “Ship Tree.”
According to a CCP employee who posted on Reddit, they actually didn’t change the name for the reason you might think. They explained:
“Just to clarify, the renaming has nothing to do with ‘ISIS’ being a name used by any real life terrorist group. I questioned Development about this when I saw the proposed name change internally, because if that was the reason then I was set to oppose it. The reasoning for the change is the fact that the name is too obscure for new players, and might confuse them.”
As a handful of EVE players have pointed out, that’s not terrible reasoning. “Ship tree” does make a lot more immediate sense than “Interbus Ship Identification System,” which is also the name of the fourth song on my upcoming prog metal concept album. I can’t help but imagine that CCP didn’t mind shedding that tiny association with a real-life terrorist group, though. It’s maybe not the worst side effect ever from their point of view, you know?
Thanks for the tip, Tomasz Jan Góralczyk.
To contact the author of this post, write to nathan.grayson@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @vahn16.