Fox McCloud, Slippy Toad, Falco Lombardi and Peppy Hare are the four characters that make up the principle Star Fox team. These are all names that are straightforward in some ways and unique in others. Ever wonder how the team came to get those names? Well wonder no more, as a former Star Fox dev has shared the details.
Dylan Cuthbert, former Star Fox dev and current Q-Games president, opened up about his work on Star Fox in a video feature celebrating the franchise’s 30th anniversary. In one portion of that video, Cuthbert shares the whole story of how naming the majority of the team fell at his feet.
“So the characters in Star Fox, the design of them, came from – I mean the actual art came from Imamura-san, who was one of the main 2D artists at the time at Nintendo. Of course, with Miyamoto’s directions as well, to direct what kind of characters were going into the game.
And then 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.”
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