Producer Hisashi Nogami has revealed that Nintendo considered using existing characters for Splatoon. The concept behind the forthcoming third-person shooter could have been built around an established franchise, but the firm ultimately decided that new material was more suitable for the game. Nintendo recently confirmed that Splatoon will contain a one-on-one multiplayer mode that can be played offline.

“First we started with the ability to shoot ink but then we added the ability to swim really fast through it, and as we kept adding more abilities to what the player was able to do, there was this kind of moment where we all realized, Oh yeah, this would work really well with squids,” said Nogami.

“Making them squids, it made a lot of the actions easy to explain and also made it really fun, and it was also this idea where all the actions we wanted to include in…