As you may have already seen, Time Extension recently had the rare opportunity to speak with Benimaru Itoh, a figure who, among other things, created the original Star Fox comic adaptation, published in Nintendo Power Magazine in 1993.

As part of this conversation, we wanted to find out as much as we could about the creation of the comic, asking Itoh about his influences, his introduction of Fox's love interest Fara, and why he gave Andross his own tragic backstory, as well as some of the original aspects he introduced that are not present in the original game's lore.

This led us to hit upon some pretty details that we don't think have been documented anywhere before, such as the reason why Itoh appears in the credits for some later Star Fox games, such as Star Fox 64 and Star Fox 64 3D.

According to Itoh, he first got the job working on the Nintendo Power comic because the Nintendo producer/designer Shigeru Miyamoto and the other Nintendo staff liked his stylised drawings of Mario that he had done for Shogakukan's various Nintendo Official Game Guidebooks. From there, he was then given a ton of freedom to expand on the concepts already in the game, something he inevitably took full advantage of:

"The first Star Fox was a 3D shooting game equipped with an FX chip, and it didn't have any side stories, so Mr. Miyamoto requested that I develop the story freely. And so, I followed on with the game concepts like the Arwing and the Lylat System, and then created the rest on my own."

Speaking to Itoh, I wanted to know whether the name of Fox's home planet, Puppetoon, localised as Papetoon, was something he had come up with himself or was part of an existing bible. In response, he clarified that it was actually his idea, revealing that it was based on his love of the Hungarian-American George Pal, and the presence of puppets in Star Fox's original marketing campaign:

"Yes, that was something I proposed. Originally, the world 'Puppetoon' referred to a technique that used transformable puppets that the stop-motion and special effects master George Pal started in the 1940's. And since the original TV commercials were also puppet animation, I named the planet out of my great respect for the master (I'm a huge George Pal fan, too)."

What was interesting to us, though, is Itoh didn't stop there, also going on to claim credit for coming up with the name of the G-Diffuser, a key component of the Star Fox crews' Arwings:

"Given the polygon display capabilities of the time, things in the game like the Arwing were put together thanks to great efforts by Mr. Imamura and the others at Nintendo, but in the manga, I thought a lot about the varied, detailed internal construction of those things (along with this, I came up with the name of concepts like the G-Diffuser anti-gravity device).

As Star Fox fans will know, not everything from the Nintendo Power comic today is considered canon, with some of Itoh's ideas (like the fate of Fox's mother) having fallen by the wayside since,

However, because the series kept making use of details like Papetoon and the G-Diffuser name, Nintendo decided to credit him on the N64 follow-up, and its remake. That's despite Itoh having long moved on to work at places like Creatures and HAL Laboratory on various Pokémon and Kirby games.

You can read our full conversation with the Star Fox artist/writer here, for more details.