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[KojiKnight]

Changing the topic, I'd like to ask about the characters. Captain Falcon and other characters don't appear in gameplay, so how did they come about?
Imamura: I remember we started thinking about various things after the game was complete.

You didn't think about characters at all during development?
Imamura: No. Captain Falcon was originally the mascot character for Super NES.

What?!
Shimizu: That statement is a bit shocking, isn't it? (laughs)

Yes! (laughs) I've never heard that Captain Falcon was the mascot for Super NES.
Imamura: Even most people at Nintendo don't know that. When development of F-ZERO was almost complete, I was doing a bunch of illustrations and someone expressed a desire to make a mascot character for Super NES, with a name like Captain Something.

From the second SNES classic interview.

https://www.nintendo.com/super-nes-classic/interview-f-zero

 

[BocoDragon]

Wow that's a megaton.

I'm gonna say Mario with cape and Yoshi became the de facto mascot instead, at least in those early years of the SNES.

 

[SatoAilDarko]

I'm pretty sure this was already known.

 

[WhiteRabbitEXE]

I'm pretty sure this was already known.

Yeah, it’s been known for several years now. Still pretty interesting though, and I’ve always wished they’d go back to the idea and try other genres with the IP. Imagine something like what we expected Star Wars 1313 to be, but with Captain Falcon and the Nintendo touch.

Shit, that would be a great project for Retro.

 

[daTRUballin]

What about Mario? They really were just going to leave him by the side after all of the successful NES games? :/

Pretty bizarre if you ask me.

 

[Hours Left]

Give Captain Falcon the hero action game he deserves.

 

[Takyon]

Give Captain Falcon the hero action game he deserves.

Melee is the next best thing

It seems to me that Falcon is the unofficial mascot of the smash series.

 

[WhiteRabbitEXE]

What about Mario? They really were just going to leave him by the side after all of the successful NES games? :/

Pretty bizarre if you ask me.

IIRC it was a response to Sega’s “cool and edgy” factor. Mario still would have been a massive focus, but games featuring Cap would have been the primary face of the marketing and “tone” of the console. The idea never really went very far though.

 

[-shadow-]

From almost being a console flagship mascot to almost having gone a decade and a half without a new game! How unfair ;_;

 

[Tadaima]

Melee is the next best thing

It seems to me that Falcon is the unofficial mascot of the smash series.

Smash is basically a game about Captain Falcon anyway

 

[SinCityAssassin]

What about Mario? They really were just going to leave him by the side after all of the successful NES games? :/

Pretty bizarre if you ask me.

Not really. It's like how Diskun was the mascot for the Famicom Disk System.

They're literally just brand mascots below Mario,

 

[Adam_Roman]

When I was a kid, everyone that I knew called Captain Falcon "See Falcon" because on the Smash 64 character select, his name was abbreviated to C. Falcon and none of us knew what F-Zero was.

Fast forward to today, I was playing Mario Kart 8 Deluxe with my girlfriend and some of her friends, and someone asked "What's Mute City?" and I said it's a track from F-Zero. They asked "What's F-Zero?" and someone else said "Falcon punch!" and they replied "Ohhh, THAT'S what Captain Falcon's from?"

I wonder how different all that might have been if the Cap did become the SNES mascot.

 

[Sentenza]

He would have been quite the unremarkable mascot.

 

[IISANDERII]

"someone expressed a desire"

So somebody at lunch was spitballing ideas = Nintendo had all these plans drawn up and ready to go