If you grew up with a PlayStation, there is a good chance that you may have heard of Ape Escape — Sony Computer Entertainment's 1999 platformer about a young boy tasked with travelling through time to round up a bunch of unruly monkeys.
However, what you might not know is that it was originally being developed as a slightly different kind of platformer than the iconic chase 'em up that we know and love today, originally following a young boy roughly "18 years old" running around a large field fighting large gorilla-like enemies with a cudgel.
That's according to Katsuyuki Kanetaka, one of the main planners on the original Ape Escape, who we recently interviewed for the site for a Making Of feature, elsewhere on the site (you can read the full article here, if you're interested).
Speaking to Kanetaka, he told us how the project ended up evolving from this very simple design into the finished version that we're all familiar with today, attributing this change to 3D games at the time offering "way too much freedom" and requiring something extra to keep players from getting lost. This led the team to come up with the concept of having something to chase, to give players an idea of where they should be going at all times and what their objective is.
He states, "Unlike the 2D games that had been released up until that point, the space in 3D games offered way too much freedom. And it became very easy for players to lose sight of what they should be doing or where they should be going. So we talked about creating something to chase, to make it clear to the player where they should go and what their objective is."
According to an old interview with producer Susumu Takatsuka in a PSM Magazine interview published in July 1999, various animals (including lions and tigers) were initially considered, but, eventually, it was decided to go with the Pipo Monkeys as the antagonists players would be chasing.
"We ultimately decided that it would be good to chase a monkey that’s running around and provoking you. Shimooka came up with that idea," says Kanetaka. "We then talked about having something on the monkey’s head, so that you could easily pick it out even from far away, and so Iijima designed Pipo['s helmet] with that in mind.
"Iijima not only drew the design illustrations, but suddenly created a polygonal model, and Pipo was completed with the second design."