While Klonoa isn’t one of the biggest faces in gaming, those that are aware of the character absolutely adore him. That’s why it’s pretty crazy to learn that Klonoa as a character almost never existed.
In an interview with
“There is a story about how Klonoa’s concept came about. I can’t say which IP but we [were working on] a game around a certain IP. As it turned out, we couldn’t use this particular IP, so we had an internal design competition to create a new character for this new game that we had created, but needed to replace the characters. [Yoshihiko] Arai’s character design won that contest and that was the birth of the Klonoa series. But, at the time, [we weren’t thinking about] Mario or Sonic, much less developing Klonoa to be the mascot of the PlayStation system. If anything, we were [just trying to create] a new mascot character for Namco.”
In an interview with Lost in Cult magazine, director Tsuyoshi Kobayashi revealed that the first Klonoa game was originally supposed to feature a different main character. For whatever reason, plans to work with that IP fell through, which lead to the creation of Klonoa.
“There is a story about how Klonoa’s concept came about. I can’t say which IP but we [were working on] a game around a certain IP. As it turned out, we couldn’t use this particular IP, so we had an internal design competition to create a new character for this new game that we had created, but needed to replace the characters. [Yoshihiko] Arai’s character design won that contest and that was the birth of the Klonoa series. But, at the time, [we weren’t thinking about] Mario or Sonic, much less developing Klonoa to be the mascot of the PlayStation system. If anything, we were [just trying to create] a new mascot character for Namco.”
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