It should be noted that for Spyro 2, Spyro's wings were adjusted to be longer and anatomically adjusted to be like bat wings, with "fingers" sticking out from the second joint.Ģ004's Spyro: A Hero's Tail features a slightly more refined and expressive Spyro with a more compact and chubby body, smaller eyes, and smaller, rounder eyebrows. In all of these games (visibility aside), Spyro appears to be a relatively close recreation of his original HD Render used for official artwork, featuring pointy eyebrows that seem to float to a degree, a round head, and a "fatter" body. The finalized design of Spyro would go on to be used from the original 1998 PlayStation game, all the way up to the last Game Boy Advance title, Spyro Orange: The Cortex Conspiracy. By the end of this pass, the character design that would become the basis for Spyro, that of a smaller, cuter, quadrupedal, a tiny pointed-nose dragon, was defined. The character had to be cute, but at the same time, mischievous, bratty, unpredictable, and something of an upstart. After the first creative pass into the project, the producers came to an important decision: they decided that the dragon would be a character that appealed to 8-10-year-olds. The initial designs were rather large and bipedal and featured a rather crude, beaked dragon. An important factor in the concept design process was that the character would eventually be modeled digitally and animated in a 3-D (Three dimensional) program, so technical considerations and the final medium were something that had to be kept in mind while the conceptual sketches were in progress. 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.
Illustration of Spyro by Charles Zembillas, showing his original green colors It was at this point that the game was set in motion. 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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