Splatoon devs didn’t want the game to be based on a Nintendo franchise

GamesRadar was recently given an opportunity to speak with Hisashi Nogami, producer of Splatoon. During the chat, Nogami spoke about how the team wanted “to not get too caught up in Nintendo’s already existing franchises”.

He said:

“We went through a period of creating lots of prototypes. We didn’t want a franchise-based game, so we made a bunch of prototypes and one of those prototypes happened to be the game that became Splatoon. The idea was ‘something fun, something new, something different,’ not ‘a shooter.'”

Nogami also spoke about how playing other games has some impact when creating new titles:

“The development team is made up of people who play games a lot, and among them are people who play shooting games a lot, including Mr. [Yusuke] Amano, one of the game’s directors, who I’ve heard has spent his college years playing Perfect Dark. As game designers who play games, you can’t really help observing things you like and don’t like, and having those have some degree of influence on your thinking. The best way to express this is that it forms a base of thought that you bring into game development, but it doesn’t directly influence the game development.”