Klonoa series director Tsuyoshi Kobayashi recently talked about Klonoa’s character design in a new interview with digital design magazine, Lost in a cult. Klono’s design came about while the company was working on a game based on a well-known platform IP, which it declined to name. In the end, it turned out that the team couldn’t use a specific IP, so Kobayashi and the team needed their own character to fit into the world they were designing. Namco ran an internal character design contest and Yoshihiko Arai’s design was chosen and became the Klonoa we know and love. Mr Kobayashi also revealed that it was also important to have a company mascot at a time with SEGA’s Sonic and Nintendo’s Mario dominating the scene. The team felt like they nailed the task with the adorable Klono.
“There is a story about how Klono’s concept came about. I can’t say which IP but we [were working on] game around a specific 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 we made, but we needed to switch characters. [Yoshihiko] Arai’s character design won that contest and that was the birth of the Klonoa series. But at that time, [we weren’t thinking about] Mario or Sonic, much less the development of Klonoa to be the mascot of the PlayStation system. If anything, we were [just trying to create] a new mascot character for Namco.”
Klonoa series director Tsuyoshi Kobayashi
