While the Nintendo Switch has done well over its many years of life in bringing various franchises to the console and even breathing new life into them, it’s not batting 1000. Specifically, there are several big-name IPs that Nintendo hasn’t used on the system in a significant way, and one of them is the Star Fox franchise. The precious space flying/fighting game was a staple on multiple Nintendo consoles and yet hasn’t made an appearance on the Switch outside of a certain fighting game. This rings especially hard when you consider the game just celebrated its 30th anniversary. Thankfully, some are celebrating in their own way.
That includes Dylan Cuthbert, who happens to be a director and programmer for the series. He did an interview with Q-Games and revealed the origins of the team names for Star Fox. You might be surprised by how simple it all was:
“They came to my desk – and I’m not sure why they came to me, but maybe they wanted good sounding, English names for these characters. And they had one design, one name already decided, which was Falco Lombardi. And the other three, they were like, ‘Well, this is a fox. This is a hare.’ You know, ‘and this is a frog or a toad.’ And they said, ‘Well… what can we call it?’ And I looked at them, and I looked at the characters they’d drawn, these really nice little sketches. And I said, ‘okay, well… I think Fox needs to have a cool sounding name, and he flies in a spacecraft, so… McCloud sounds pretty good, let’s give him McCloud.’ And for the other two, I kind of looked at them and I just kind of laughed because the names just came into my mind and I said, ‘Okay, we’ll call this guy Slippy because he looks a bit slippery. And this guy looks old, but he looks like he’s got lots of energy. Let’s call him Peppy.’ And that’s where the names came from. And they stuck. So it was a pretty fun moment in the development of the game.”
Given the popularity of the names and characters, you likely expected things to be a bit more dramatic and “intense” to get the right names. But no, it wasn’t. Instead, it was simply a man at a desk with some art and such in front of him and deciding on some names.
Whether we’ll see this crew in action again is up in the air, but we can still celebrate the game’s anniversary.
