When Hothead announced the third entry in its dungeon crawl SLASH role-playing series this past week -- titled solely "The Baconing," dropping its usual "DeathSpank" moniker -- we couldn't help but wonder what had happened to the series' main character to get him taken off title duties. Did series creator Ron Gilbert take the rights to the character with him, for instance?

As it turns out, there's a fairly simple reason behind the name change: "We haven't removed the words or name 'DeathSpank' from the title for any legal reason. In fact, the title was changed just by asking our fans," a Hothead rep told Joystiq. Aha! Still, we couldn't help but wonder why Hothead would voluntarily ditch the brand name that it stuck to the last two games, effectively walking away from the brand recognition it built up over the past two entries.