In a recent interview, Ubisoft has revealed that they started work on the Star Fox and Starlink collaboration even before the project was finalized and the deal was signed between Ubisoft and Nintendo.
This was revealed by them in an exclusive interview with Okay Cool where the producer Matthew Rose said that the work on the project was ‘started right away’. This was started after the initial talks with Nintendo were highly exciting and in a positive direction. The team at Ubisoft started working on the concepts and an Arwing was 3d-printed which was highly detailed and could be taken apart as well.
Matthew’s official word were
Well, you know, what’s amazing is that’s kind of the strength of Ubisoft. Ubisoft almost runs each team like a bunch of entrepreneurial ventures. Each team really has this freedom to experiment and try things and go places and take calculated risks. And draw upon the incredible resources that the Ubisoft network has to offer, but not necessarily be constrained by needing to get clearance up some crazy chain. So for us, you know, we have our partners in Paris that we work so closely with, and we were like ‘hey, we are so passionate and excited, we think we can make this work. We’re gonna go for it.’
So we just started working, but we were a little cautious. We didn’t want to dedicate all of our resources to it, and then we got the invitation. To ‘hey, do you guys want to come to Kyoto?’ And it was like a week before… we to go, we had the meeting. They were like ‘We’ve got a slot, it’s in a week.’ It’s on. And we were like ‘woah, woah, woah, woah, okay.’ Fortunately, we had started work before we were really… confirmed anything. So we scrambled to put together this pitch and pull everything together and, for instance, we had this 3D-printed Arwing, but we didn’t have time to paint it properly – to like ‘pro paint’ it. Because, you know, if you’ve gotta do it, you gotta do it right – especially for Nintendo.
And so, but 3D-printed plastic it was like beige. It looked kind of ugly, so we spray painted it this kind of really neutral grey color. It was a nice finish though. It was this nice, you can imagine, you know, it was almost like you’d see an untextured 3D model in a game, and so we spray painted it grey and brought it over, and had the concept art of the pilots and things, and so we went to present and it was just this crazy surprise to have the whole Star Fox team there that we weren’t expecting at all and Mr. Miyamoto. And uh… yeah… pretty amazing.
You can check out the official interview at the link below in which there is a lot more information about the collaboration and how the final shape of the title came into being.
Starlink: Battle for Atlas is now available for Nintendo Switch, PS4 and Xbox One.
