The community started under the name of Carime Project, with Carime being a portmanteau of cars an anime, which were shared interests amongst a small group of us who loved to get together and drift on Forza Horizon 2. As a group in the game, a lot of us sported itasha liveries on our team cars, which blended our favorite anime characters and our favorite drift cars. After a while, I saw potential in a creative project after realizing that what the glue that held us together was actually our mashup of very different interests and the openness towards the things that we each liked.

The ETCH Network name change occurred at the beginning of 2021 after I decided to reach out to the people within our community - through friends, acquaintances, and our Discord members - toe evaluate how people from different walks of life saw us and what drew them to the group in the first place. The process took a while and plenty of discussions were held.

After studying the feedback received, I realized that the representation of ETCH in someone’s mind was formed by a plethora of factors - from how we came across a particular person, the activities that person has participated in with us, and the time they’ve spent interacting with others in the group. For example, in the ETCH Discord server, the members joined over time for differing reasons - some joined after watching Twitch streams that I used to do, some joined after meeting us through different games, while some are friends who just want to hang out and chat.

At the end of the day, the name change was defined by the perception of the group from the community members themselves, as well as my interpretation of what would be the best path forward for content creation that I could easily manage and maintain. Thus, the name ETCH - Eats, Tech, Cars, and Hobbies - was born and represents the key points of interest that I wanted to capture moving forward.