It’s Good Practice, But Still
Listen, if you want to really impress a future business partner, you want to come prepared. Like the Starlink team did, before meeting up with Nintendo for the first time. They showed up to that initial meeting with an Arwing and other mockups all ready to go. That’s how excited they were about the prospect of working with Nintendo!
According to producer Matthew Rose, they had this Star Fox connection in their heads right from the beginning. The team was “so excited by even them having this conversation with us, even though they hadn’t confirmed anything.” This excitement fueled their enthusiasm, getting them to work on concept art and 3D models, all in the hopeful anticipation of a positive response.
Lucky for the Starlink team, the whole Star Fox dev crew (and Shigeru Miyamoto!) were attending the meeting in question. The rest is history, or at least a pretty rad game involving Fox McCloud and a bunch of other pilots tooling around a solar system saving the day through space battles. You can check out our review of Starlink here. Starlink: Battle for Atlas is out now on PS4, Xbox One and the Nintendo Switch.