Names tend to arrive when something needs one. On September 20th it was the debug window, which needed a product name for the line across its top. The fork had been running for weeks as a copy of a project with someone else's name on it. It was time.
Eight candidates
Each name was checked against the American, European and international trademark registers, and against anything Naughty Dog and Sony use. Most did not survive:
- Orrery and Auriga were already marks for game software.
- Halcyon had a European mark in the middle of an opposition.
- Selene had a fresh American mark that covered emulators.
- Vesper was too close to an existing game mark, Vespera.
- Themis had a live European mark for software.
Two came through clean: Iapetus and Phaethon.
Phaethon
In Greek myth, Phaethon is the son of the sun god, who takes his father's chariot across the sky. It is pronounced FAY-uh-thon. The README took the name the same day, and the rest followed over the next week: the window title and the dialogs, the game's own folders on disk, the log, the compiler console's welcome, the launcher, the forge and, before the month was out, this site.
Alex (maintainer, and a mechanical engineer by trade)