Development
The game company Nintendo worked closely with Argonaut during the early years of the NES and SNES. They developed a prototype on the SNES, initially codenamed "SNESGlider", which was inspired by their earlier 8-bit game Starglider, and then ported this prototype to the SNES. Programmer Jez San told Nintendo that this was as good as it could get unless they were allowed to design custom hardware to make the SNES better at 3D. Nintendo assented to this, and San hired chip designers to make the Super FX chip, the first 3D graphics accelerator in a consumer product. The SuperFX was so much more powerful than the SNES's standard processor that they joked that the SNES was just a box to hold the chip.
The main game design was done by Shigeru Miyamoto and Katsuya Eguchi. Characters were designed by Takaya Imamura, and music was composed by Hajime Hirasawa. Nintendo suggested the "arcade-style shooting" element of the game and Argonaut brought the idea of using space ships. Yoichi Yamada, a level designer for many Nintendo games, laid out and edited the Star Fox maps.
Miyamoto stated that he wanted the Star Fox series to star animal characters since he was not interested in making a series with conventional science fiction stories with robots, monsters, and superheroes. He decided to use a fox as a main character since it reminded him of Fushimi Inari-taisha, about a fifteen minute walk from the Nintendo corporate headquarters. Miyamoto explained that he had always planned to use the English word "fox" instead of the Japanese word "kitsune" (キツネ?).
Imamura used Japanese folklore as an inspiration to add a pheasant and a hare as two other protagonists. Imamura populated the Cornerian army with dogs and the enemy army with monkeys, and made Pepper a dog and Andross a monkey, since there is a Japanese expression about fighting like dogs and monkeys. Imamura added a toad; the inspiration came from a staff member of EADS who used a toad as his personal mascot. Miyamoto created several puppets and photographed them to use as artwork for the cover of the Star Fox game; Miyamoto was a fan of English puppet dramas, such as Thunderbirds, so he wanted the game cover to feature puppets.
Read more about this topic: Star Fox (video game)
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