George R.R. Martin on why the show is called Game of Thrones, not A Song of Ice and Fire

George R.R. Martin published the first book in his Song of Ice and Fire series back in 1996. By the time HBO came calling about turning his books into a TV show, he had four novels out, each with a different title: A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, and A Feast for Crows.

HBO ended up calling its epic fantasy show Game of Thrones, after the first book in the series. But why? Why not call the show A Song of Ice and Fire? The show was adapting more than just the first book, after all. The first novel in The Wheel of Time series was called The Eye of the World, but you didn’t see Amazon limit itself to that title when making its Wheel of Time TV show.

Speaking on a livestream with Portuguese magazine Bang, Martin gave his thoughts on why this may have happened. “[T]he TV networks make these decisions,” he said. “They purchase…the film and TV rights to my books, and for whatever reason they wanted to call it Game of Thrones rather than A Song of Ice and Fire.”

"I suppose they did some kind of internal testing or something as they always do and settled on that thing. It is interesting…how iconic that phrase has become: game of something. I see it everywhere. I turn on the TV and there someone is, “well, this is a game of” and fill in the blank. It’s kind of flattering but also amusing. Nothing I ever expected."

Martin is right that “game of blank” did become a common phrase whipped out whenever someone wants to talk about pretty much any kind of conflict, from personal squabbles all the way up to actual war. I think they made the right choice.

How George R.R. Martin keeps Game of Thrones separate from A Song of Ice and Fire

But Martin sees another upside to the TV show not adopting the name of his wider series: “It does help me to separate the books from the TV show,” he said. “Something occurs in Game of Thrones, but it’s not necessarily gonna happen in A Song of Ice and Fire and vice versa.”

The longer Game of Thrones went on, the more changes it made to Martin’s books. The final three seasons (give or take a few episodes in season 6) went completely beyond the source material. At that point, showrunner David Benioff and Dan Weiss were working off a broad outline Martin had given them years before. It stands to reason that the final two books in Martin’s series, The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring, will be quite different than what we saw on TV, even if we’ll still be able to draw some comparisons. The different titles of the TV show and the book series only reinforce that.

Of course, whether we’ll ever get to read Winds or Dream is another matter. That’s a whole different story:

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