Like many other people, I have been enjoying my time scooting around the United Kingdom in Forza Horizon 4, but that has been made all the sweeter because my name is Sonny Jim.
Not in real life, of course. I am not Sonny Jim. But when Forza Horizon 4 presented me with with a huge list of names that I could go by, I had a hard choice to make. Do I go with my own name? Do I choose a cool nickname? Do I think that I could actually pull off the name Rocket?
When I saw Sonny Jim as an option, I knew I had to go for it. After all, Sonny Jim is one of the greatest characters in all of television history. Sonny Jim Jones, the child of Dougie Jones, was the quiet child who patiently dealt with the green-jacketed Dougie in the third season of Twin Peaks. He loves pancakes and he loves his dad, as is plainly visible in this clip from the show:
If that didn’t make any sense to you, don’t worry about it. But now you have a sense of who Sonny Jim is and why I think he’d make for an excellent on-road, off-road, and mixed event racer.
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Sonny Jim is a paragon of the virtues necessary in car racing enthusiast. He’s calm. He’s quiet. He loves a good laugh. His name is Sonny Jim, which is a name befitting a stock car racer from 1965. It’s the name of someone who would spend every single season at an outdoor car racing slash music festival, constantly plugged into a radio where people are yelling their name.
“Great work, Sonny Jim” comes in over the radio a lot.
More seriously, I really appreciate the wide range of names that Forza Horizon 4 makes available for players. As someone with a name that has rarely been captured in these kinds of fully-voiced systems in the past, I like that the developers here are really going the extra mile and including many different names to choose from.
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It doesn’t hurt that it also lets me live out my dream of roleplaying as a grown-up Sonny Jim who loves music, hates speed limits, and who became an adult in a David Lynch hell world that includes hovercraft races.
And, to be honest, being named Sonny Jim gave me the confidence I needed to put the name “Coop” on my in-game license plate.
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