Decisions would come later based upon the sketches that were generated as Charles embarked upon the creative journey. It didn't matter what the dragon looked like at this point. The creative direction was simple and basic: Draw a dragon that a video game can be developed around. Various drawings were the first pass in an attempt to find the character that would eventually become Spyro. Insomniac brought on illustrator Charles Zembillas and tasked him with creating their dragon with the mentioned caveats in place. According to some developers, a second name - 'Pyro' - was briefly used, being the Latin and Greek word for 'fire.' The name was altered to Spyro shortly afterwards, which would be the name that ultimately ended up sticking. The name carried over to much of the game's development time, and was even reported on by retail outlets as late as March 1998. Allegedly, this was nothing more than a codename for the character, picked in this manner to remind them to not 'get sued' by Disney. Prior to deciding on a name for the character, Spyro was referred to as 'Pete', a tongue-in-cheek reference to the 1977 Disney film, Pete's Dragon. Īn early design sketch, often assumed to be Spyro. In early 1997, Spyro's purple color was chosen, due to it contrasting well with greens and other colors commonly found in various environments. Additionally, as there were several other green reptile characters such as Gex and Croc already on the same console at the time, another color was decided upon to help Spyro differentiate from these characters. In very early development, Spyro was depicted as green, but developers noted that he would blend into the grass in the levels too much. With the dragon decided upon, the developers then began conceptualizing names and potential designs for the character. Spyro, as a concept, was originally brought up by Insomniac in-house artist Craig Stitt, who had an interest in the fictional beasts. It was at this point that the game was set in motion.Īn illustration of Spyro done by Charles Zembillas and coloured by another team member

Due to the changing demographics for the PlayStation, at the suggestion of Mark Cerny, they decided to make a child-friendly game, with the success of games like Super Mario 64 making them decide upon a platformer as their genre of choice. The poor sales disheartened the company, and they had decided to do something different for their next project. Their first project, Disruptor, a first-person shooter, performed poorly, and Universal decided to contract them to create three games for Sony's PlayStation console.

Insomniac Games was founded in 1994 by Ted Price and named in 1995. Character Development and History Pre-History and Disruptor

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