Dragon Age without dragons seems incomprehensible now, as the monsters seem essential to the series. But early on in Dragon Age: Origins' development, the game didn't have dragons--or, as you might've guessed, a title. In fact, the title came first.

According to a new interview with TheGamer, BioWare hadn't considered adding dragons until it started coming up with a title for its new fantasy game. The studio had originally conceived the game as a fantasy epic set in a world past the age of giant monsters and high magic, where dragons had been driven extinct. After the name "Dragon Age" was created (literally by chance), the team was directed to find a way to bring living dragons back to the game.

"Early on, Dragon Age didn't have a name," environmental artist Ian Stubbington stated. "There were some ideas but nothing concrete, so it was decided that one of the coders would make a quick random name generator. They knocked something together and added a whole bunch of fantasy words to the list. It was fired up and produced some names and the one that got the final vote by the team at the time was of course 'Dragon Age.' [Lead writer] David Gaider responded [with] something like, 'Hmm, we better add some dragons to the story then.'"