From Crash Bandicoot to Lara Croft: the unsuspected origins of video game characters

There was a time when we were one with the Game Boy , we were blowing Sunday afternoon blowing at the cartridges of the Mega Drive or wasting the weekend pay in master combos on the machines of the recreational machines. We made dear friends, 8-bit characters or, at most, polygonal contours, who accompanied us in our risky missions and exciting games. Today we are going to tell certain curiosities about the origins of some of these friends.

Ms. Pac-Man

We all know that hungry yellow circle: Pac-Man . Aka Comecocos Your life consists of devouring pixelated balls, supervitaminating, and swelling to eat ghostly tremulous. Something less known is Ms. Pac-Man , who does not know if she is his wife or niece, but that ended up functioning as a sequel to the original game in a strange way.

Ms. Pac-Man or Mrs. Comecocos was originally conceived as another game, a vulgar copy of the Pac-Man called Crazy Otto . ”It was exactly the same as the Pac-Man, but with the subtle difference that this circle, also yellow He had legs, he was developed by the masters of plagiarism, General Computer Corporation , which, to avoid obvious demand, presented the video game to Midway , the distributor of Pac-Man in the US They bought and modified it (they removed the legs and they put a bow), and, hala, they already had the sequel to Pac-Man and the first female character of the consoles: Ms. Pac-Man.

Wario

The enmeshed nemesis of the Italian plumber was not devised by Shigeru Miyamoto , original creator of Mario , but designed by Hiroji Kiyotake . The idea was to give Mario a more personal goal than saving princesses in trouble or mushrooms alive. So, with the idea of ​​emulating the iconic struggle between Popeye and Bluto, Mario, the mustache mycologist, would have a rival at the height, Wario .

In Japanese " warui " means "bad" and when combined with the name of Mario gives us the perfect and opposite composition of "Wario". You just had to turn the M of the plumber's hat, an idea that the team loved, and prepare a character from the designs of Bluto and Strómboli , evil owner of the circus at the Disney Pinocchio .

Crash Bandicoot

They were late nineties, and the team of Naughty Dog , video game developer, wanted to create a platform game that would rise to predecessors like Super Mario , Sonic or Donkey Kong . Difficult task

Given the dates that we rounded (1995, 1996) the game would be fully developed in 3D and as the team spent a lot of time watching their character from behind, they came to call that character, still undefined, "The Sonic Ass . "

For the creation of Crash they wanted to be inspired by a cuckoo animal, real, but little known. Then they came up with the great idea of ​​choosing a family of marsupial mammals, very similar to a rat, which are known as "bandicuts." So if you thought your childhood hero was a fierce dingo, an intelligent fox or a daring coyote, you were wrong. It is a rat of Australia that has the backward marsupium, unlike the kangaroo.

They chose the color orange for Crash to stand out from the green jungle and distinguish it from other jumping jiggers like Sonic or Mario. Several names were proposed for him. In fact, it almost ends up calling "Willy Wombat . " Luckily someone got in the way.

Monkey Island Guybrush Threepwood

That John Silver "El Largo" and Johnny Depp forgive us, but even the most forgetful and distracted of lovers of graphic adventures reminds Guybrush, the protagonist of the greatest of pirate adventures.

Ron Gilbert was the creator of this cult game, Monkey Island , and christened his main character as " Guybrush " due to the computer program with which he was drawn, Deluxe Paint . Since the character still had no name, he was known as "Guy", "Chico" in English. The software put the endings ".brush" to your saved files, so the name of your file was literally "guy.brush". The surname " Threepwood " was chosen through a contest within LucasArts , in its day, video game creation company, in honor of the characters created by the humorous writer PG Wodehouse .

Lara Croft by Tomb Raider

Toby Gard , the art director of Tomb Raider , originally had something else in mind: a male character with a hat and a whip ... Yes, he had conceived Indiana Jones again for his game. So after someone opened his eyes, surely putting the original trilogy into a marathon and laughing at him, Toby decided to reinvent his character as a woman.

At that time women were uncommon in adventure games, but Toby noted that players frequently chose female avatars to fight in fighting games, so he decided to definitely convert his character to a woman. And is that who has not chosen Chun-Li in Street Fighter by pure fixation or to make lateral splits with high mortal capacity?

So we already had the protagonist, a Latin archaeologist named at that time "Laura Cruz" . But the company wanted a more familiar name for the English-speaking public and they changed it to "Laura Croft" , and later, for loudness, it passed to the renowned "Lara Croft" . Especially for fear that the Americans would not know, nor could, pronounce the name of "Laura."

Super Mario Bowser

This species of turtle with muscular dysmorphia was created by Shigeru Miyamoto . Its original name, by which the old school will know it, is "King Koopa" . It comes from a Korean dish based on fried rice the "kuppa". His appearance is inspired by the Bull King of the Japanese animated film "Alakazam El Grande" , 1960.

Later someone would point out to Miyamoto that Bowser is the leader of a turtle mob so it should look something like one of them, and Yoichi Kotabe , companion of the well-known Hayao Miyazaki , who arrived at Nintendo and put him on shell to the monster and painted it green. Now he was prepared to be the factual and spiritual leader of a tribe of evil turtles.

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