Someone Guessed the New ‘Star Wars’ Title, ‘The Force Awakens,’ Back in 2012

On Thursday, Lucasfilm announced the highly anticipated title to its highly anticipated new 'Star Wars' movie, now known as 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens.'

Once a new untitled 'Star Wars' movie is announced, it becomes kind of a fun Internet guessing game speculating what its title might be. Since the announcement that there would be an Episode VII back in October of 2012, there have been a lot of message board guesses. Today, using a Google search for the term "The Force Awakens," but omitting anything that came today, the earliest reference to this title came way back on Dec 21, 2012, when a user at the 'Star Wars' fan site The Force.net named "Queen Gimmedala" guessed 'The Force Awakens.' Even more remarkable, this wasn't a list of like 100 guesses -- nope, it's there all by itself. (And this particular poster signed up for an account that day, posted twice, then was never heard from again.)

UPDATE: TheForce.net tracked down the user in question and broke the news to her that she had guessed the title almost two years in advance. She explained how she was able to get it so right:

I totally forgot I came up with it...Ultimately this was a random guess. No inside info or connection to Lucas. But to me it seemed logical that the first movie in this trilogy would need to address the force. I'm a believer that the movie titles in each trilogy closely relate and I suspect this will carry over for the ST.

So I knew it was going to be 3 words, and the force. I also know that the wording would be vague/ambiguous/old fashioned like all the other six movie titles.

After today's title announcement, playing off the word "Awakens," Twitter exploded with a lot of "The Force needs coffee" jokes. (I am guilty of this.) As it turns out, we are also two years behind on those jokes as well, because immediately following Queen Gimmedala's soothsaying prediction, another user named "furcifer" posted this zing:

Now, is this for sure the earliest guess? The Internet is a fickle beast and sometimes it's hard to navigate, especially now that it is flooded with that term, but, as far as we can tell, your winner of the "guess the title of Episode VII" sweepstakes is Queen Gimmedala. Congratulations, Queen Gimmedala, you win nothing.

Mike Ryan has written for The Huffington Post, Wired, Vanity Fair and GQ. He is the senior editor of ScreenCrush. You can contact him directly on Twitter.