Star Fox dev on how the members of the crew were named

Dylan Cuthbert, a programmer and director for the Star Fox series, has spoken about how the names of the crew were decided. This was shared in a special 30th anniversary celebration video.

Cuthbert shared the following:

“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.”

Star Fox ended up on the NES in 1993. Cuthbert was later the director for the DS game Star Fox Command in 2006, and held the same role for Star Fox 64 3D on 3DS in 2011.

You can check out the full Star Fox celebration video with Cuthbert below. A few other questions were answered, and you can watch him play through the original game.