Starlink dev on what it was like pitching the Star Fox collaboration to Nintendo and Miyamoto
Developers of Starlink: Battle for Atlas have often explained how the Star Fox collaboration came to be. After the game was first shown at last year’s E3, executives and developers from Nintendo ended up seeing it behind closed doors. Nintendo obviously liked what it saw, as the Starlink team was invited to Japan to pitch a potential collaboration.
Creative director Laurent Malville told Kotaku UK that as far as he’s aware, the collaboration was Nintendo’s idea. He also spoke about what it was like pitching the potential partnership to Nintendo and Shigeru Miyamoto:
“We worked tirelessly on presenting and workshopping how Fox could be integrated in the world of Starlink, and we started prototyping and 3D printing an Arwing that would embed the Starlink technology, because you know we had to fit the connectors in there…
We had fun with that, and we also worked on some cool features like, this is the only starship that has this mechanical movement there, so you can put it in combat mode, navigation mode, and so we 3D printed that, and it was a great model.
And we brought it to Nintendo, to Mr Miyamoto as a gift as well as other Starlink ships, and I’ll never forget the moment – so we presented the game and I handed to Mr Miyamoto this 3D printed Arwing with the Starlink connectors as well as the other Starlink ship, and Mr Miyamoto started playing with it and looking at it and removed the wing!
We had made the wings modular because this was the concept behind Starlink, that everything is modular – so Mr Miyamoto removed the wing and plugged in the wing of another ship – I think it was the one from Neptune, at least I think – I was a bit nervous at this point is all! – and when he removed the wing of the Arwing, he looked around to his team and they were looking at it and thinking, and so we didn’t know if they were like Ooooh – what’s gonna happen?’
Actually it was great because Mr Miyamoto shared some feedback with us. And so he told us that he understood what we were doing and that he thought it was better for the players, but they had to talk together to see if they were OK with it because we were effectively changing the silhouette of the Arwing if you put different wings on it.”
Not too long after the presentation, the Starlink team got the go-ahead from Nintendo on the Star Fox collaboration:
“So… a couple of weeks after coming back here from the Japan trip, we had the recent good news that we had the green light for doing what we were suggesting, and also to keep the wings modular. So then we did some concept art to better integrate and be really truthful to the Arwing and the collaboration with Nintendo.
So they were, for example, drawing on our concept art, saying ‘Oh, maybe you should do the back that way…’ and our artists were super excited to work on that too to be as fruitful as possible.”
Malville says it “feel surreal” to be the first developer with an Arwing and a top Nintendo character playable on the Switch.
