A video game’s name has to do a lot in a very small space: it has to communicate what the game is about as well as grab players’ attention. As Mino Dev–the developer of Rabbit and Steel–learned the hard way, names should also not fundamentally break storefronts.
Rabbit and Steel is the sophomore game by Mino, which puts the fate of the Moonlit Kingdom into the hands of up to four players who traverse roguelike environments that blend bullet hell and MMO raid dynamics. This combination led to strong success, which even took Mino by surprise, but that success may not have happened without a lesson he learned from his previous game, Maiden and Spell. Actually, those aren’t the proper names of the games, as Mino explained in a The Best War Games interview. They should be properly written as Maiden & Spell and Rabbit & Steel, but computers do not like ampersands.
You might notice something very, very slightly different about the Steam pages for Rabbit and Steel and Maiden and Spell. T hat is that Maiden and Spell uses the ampersand and Rabbit and Steel just uses the word "and"…If you ever write about the game or have to put it into anything, I would recommend the same because, boy, computers do not like that simple "&."
So destructive was the ampersand that it lives on as a meme in Mino’s community four years after the humble unicode shorthand absolutely turned Maiden and Spell’s launch upside down.
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“The Ampersand Just Breaks Everything”
Early reviews for Rabbit and Steel have been Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam, and over the five days following its launch, concurrent player statistics on the platform consistently floated around the 5,000 mark, both impressive feats for an indie title put together as a love letter to Final Fantasy 14. Part of that is how Mino approaches discoverability on Steam, and breaking it is certainly one way to get remembered, if not discovered at first.
When initially released as Maiden & Spell, Maiden and Spell wreaked absolute havoc with the backend of Steam’s platform, Mino explained. That problem isn’t unique to Steam, as the ampersand is used rather heavily in coding languages, meaning its use in a game’s title tends to break systems not specifically designed to expect them, specifically when used to replace "and." In the case of Maiden and Spell, the problem started on launch day, when it was impossible to search for the game in Steam’s database.
I have to say that the ampersand was a nightmare. I feel like keeping a list of all the computer systems that ampersands destroy–Steam is one of them! The first few days, Maiden and Spell didn't even show up in Steam search because it had an ampersand. You couldn't search for the game. I had to fix that by changing some backend things.
From Unsearchable to Meme
That stepped on the launch of the game, which is an important time for a developer. Mino’s woes didn’t end when he fixed the name of the game in Steam’s file system, however. The true birth of his community’s ampersand meme came from the game’s soundtrack.
When I made a soundtrack for the game, it defaulted to "Maiden &&& Spell" Soundtrack, a nd it's just become this meme within my Discord where you just see a bunch of "&&&" in everything. The ampersand just breaks everything, so while the official branding of Rabbit and Steel is with an ampersand, everywhere I have to put it into a database is just the word and.
The reason behind these problems has to do with coding languages. Those instructions are filled with math, logical argumentation, and shorthand designed to communicate human ideas in ways computers are able to comprehend and follow. Those specific languages, however, can remain inscrutable to many users due to the wide variety of languages designed for different purposes, and not knowing what a programmer was prepared to encounter when building something like Steam.
Ampersands, specifically, have a variety of functions in different languages. In C++, one common use for the symbol "&" is a basic logical operation pairing two pieces of information as a literal stand-in for the word “and,” but in HTML, the "&" is used to indicate the placement of what’s called an HTML Entity. HTML Entities are short statements used to stand-in for symbols HTML normally needs for its syntax. For instance, the "<" symbol that typically starts HTML code has to be written as "<" (for “less than”) in order to actually appear in text. This appears to be what broke the soundtrack’s title.
In any case, a valuable lesson for any new or experienced indie dev was learned: sometimes style isn’t worth the hassle to a developer. As a result, while Mino officially stylizes the title of the game as Rabbit & Steel, he advises writing the word “and” instead.
Rabbit and Steel is available on Steam.