This isn’t a typical Looking Glass article, and if you’re just popping in, it’s not really representative of what we normally do here. This is going to be something very different.
The Gamecube really was the little console that could.
Of course, I say that as a proud member of the Gamecube generation, being 12 when the console launched. Graphically, it felt like a quantum leap from the previous generation. Even to this day, you can look back at the absolute high end of what the Gamecube was capable of, and sure, you’ll notice it’s not as powerful as today’s games, but the high end still holds up. You see it with games like Metroid Prime and Star Fox Adventures, and it’s the latter that I’ll be deep-diving today.
But to clarify, this whole thing isn’t going to be about Star Fox Adventures. This is going to be about me, and why the anniversary of this game in particular is so meaningful to me.
The game itself, though? I still think it’s good. The visuals are exceptional, night-and-day from the blocky N64 graphics of the original Dinosaur Planet game that was cannibalized to make SFA. The water effects are beautiful; the fur effects on characters who have it (so Fox, Krystal and Peppy) hold up today.
There’s also something special about the way characters’ facial expressions and bodily tics are rigged and animated. Expressions and tics of wonderment, annoyance, charm, panic and everything you could want are beautifully believable. Again, this was 2002, when most attempts at “ultra realism” in the 3D space tended to fall well flat. So I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a lot of the high-end games from that era whose graphics still hold up today deal in fantasy/alien/otherwise heavily stylized visuals.
In hindsight it’s actually kind of interesting how in terms of its story flow, the game feels like it’s in a tug of war between trying to tell a serious story and trapping itself inside very “video-game-adjacent” tropes, like how all characters seem to know exactly what you’re doing and have just the right item for you to continue on your quest at just the right time. Criticism-free nostalgia dances with things that were oddities at the time and odder today, like how their attempt at a conlang with the Saurian dialect is just a 1:1 letter shuffle of the alphabet, or how the game’s seemingly main antagonist is missing a boss battle because Rare got bought out and didn’t have time to truly finish the game. And hyping up a new character as a major player and then giving her a damsel-in-distress background role for most of the game isn’t cool.
Some days I wonder why, canonically, these dinosaurs aren’t anthro even though they exist in an anthro universe. Then I think maybe it’d be a lot weirder if Tricky was on two legs and so Fox would just be running around with an actual child, Short Round style, and…anyway moving on?
I’m trying really hard to keep from deep-diving the game itself, because there are so many sources out there who have done that over the years (decades, plural now!) and probably for this anniversary too, and again, this piece isn’t so much about the game itself.
But I need to be real here. I sat with this blank page for the longest time struggling with what to write. That doesn’t tend to happen with me; I tend to come into these with a very firm idea of the angle I want to take on a subject. But with this, it was just something that I knew I needed to write, and I needed to write it here in the latter half of 2022.
I’ve had this website for a decade now and have resisted writing something as intensely personal as what I’m about to do here. This is going to be a deep dive that might not matter to anyone but me, and it’s going to be far more hideously self-indulgent than I’ve allowed myself to be in basically my entire life of writing content, either published or splattered into the digital ether. But given the circumstances, there’s never going to be a better time.
Star Fox Adventures and Metroid Prime: how am I supposed to sum up two games that, together, represent (and in some ways provided the impetus for) my life changing in such an affirming, overwhelming and positive way? (I’ll get to Prime next time.)
Because sometimes the stars align just so and turn things into something more than the sum of their parts, little things becoming big things, seemingly unconnected things being connected after all – almost like all the little things end up mattering in their own way. I was 13 when both these games landed, and it was just earlier that year, when I was 12, that I’d realized I wanted – that I needed to tell stories. It didn’t matter the format, so long as the stories were getting created, and long-form writing just happened to be the storytelling format I’m at least pretty capable at.
All this happened around the same time I realized the buddings of a strong and life-long love for music, and my synesthesia was coming into bloom – I won’t say I ‘realized’ I had it then, because with no reason to suspect otherwise, I just assumed everyone was like this, seeing music manifest in the space behind their eyes as colours, shapes and vivid forms, until years later when I read a description of synesthesia and was like, “…Wait.”
This matters because as a storyteller, I consider synesthesia a powerful gift that I wouldn’t trade for the world; when every song you listen to becomes a visual portal to a whole world between the notes, something bigger on the inside, it becomes second nature to parlay that into visual stories as I’m listening to music that really moves me. I suppose I mention this because when I bring up my creative process, it’s very important that you picture music.
And it just so happens that all these things were happening at once as I was really getting drawn into these brand-new games, themselves in a way whole worlds that felt bigger on the inside – is it really any surprise that my early writing latched on to the Star Fox fanfic scene?
In the Star Fox fan community at the time, I received kindness, open arms, encouraging feedback and a group of like-minded fans who loved sharing creative work and ideas. I kept writing. Poorly. I learned to grapple with the understanding that seeing whole worlds within worlds inside my head was a different beast entirely than translating them to the page.
But I received encouragement, because that’s what you should do. It burns me up to see young writers be failed by the community they’ve chosen to reach out to instead of encouraged.
Here’s something to think about, though: I’m going to talk next time about Metroid Prime, which came out 20 years ago as well, but you might be wondering why early-me gravitated to the Star Fox series to write fanfics for, rather than Metroid, considering Star Fox’s worldbuilding is not nearly as…good? Like, it’s serviceable as a backdrop for a game, but on the other hand Metroid Prime presents us a far more realized sci-fi universe.
But maybe that’s just it. Metroid is already doing the thing, whereas so much of Star Fox’s worldbuilding feels less like a fully realized world, and more like a great springing-off point for more exploration, something that people can fill in with their own ideas and trappings. There are plot threads in the Star Fox canon that had the potential to be really emotional or interesting or epic if explored, but Nintendo just wasn’t ever interested in doing that. (Examples include the original Star Fox team being betrayed by Pigma, Krystal’s mysterious past and connection to the Krazoa being explored, etc, etc, etc)
So we wrote, me and this generation of kids who latched on to this universe that felt like it was begging for us to come fill in and expand it with our own ideas.
Creation consumed my waking life. Since then, I never stopped living with one foot in the world and one elsewhere. The abstractions from my childhood had crystallized into something far more real. You could put headphones on me and the right song with the right headspace, and I could completely lose clock-time, so deep in my world that it’d take a system shock to pull me out of it. Everything felt like it started coming together around that time, twenty years ago.
There were times when I had impostor syndrome up the wazoo. I was being given so much encouragement by so many writers who were astronomically better than me in so many ways. I didn’t know what they saw in me; they were what I wanted to be, even as I remained driven to tell these stories by something bigger on the inside. None of them actually know about that, I kept it quiet. Over the years, I kept improving. The impostor syndrome faded as my confidence in my own abilities rose.
And people were willing to stick with me. Even when I, as a 13 year old whose mind was still developing, fucked up in personal and public ways (in hindsight, mainly just the cringey teenage drama that we all try to forget in ancient chatlogs long since lost to the digital void). I received second chances and warmth. To this day I wonder if my perspectives on criminal justice – that there is no true justice without rehabilitation and second chances – is informed by the choice my friends made to not abandon me even at my worst, even though I’ve obviously never done anything as bad as the poor souls you see talked about in the conversation about criminal justice. But I mention it because it shows that the warmth we send out into the world, or the coldness, resonates and gets paid forward.
Naturally, that particular community also led me to realize that anthro art was easily my favourite aesthetic, which led me down a whole other rabbit hole of art and characters and – let’s be honest, you’re not super surprised that I have strong ties to the furry community at the very least. Like – I don’t exactly have a fursona or anything, but I hang out with furries all the time, I love the art, I’m involved in other series that are anthro, and I’m pretty sure Architects’ space birds absolutely have furry crossover appeal despite ostensibly being aliens and I’m in a place where I just sort of stopped giving a shit about trying to downplay it. Don’t waste your life suppressing the stuff you love trying to impress crappy people who don’t give a fuck about you.
The friends I made in those communities, I made for life. I still talk to a number of them near daily. We’re grown up now. Some have kids, we’ve all had shitty jobs, we’ve all gained and lost people. We’re still ridiculous.
Through these communities, I met someone who changed my life for the better in ways that are difficult to quantify. Someone who took a ridiculous child whose mind was moving way too fast for his own good, forgave his mistakes and stayed by his side through thick and thin. Someone with a seemingly inexhaustible well of patience that I don’t know if I deserved. She made me better in ways that lasted. To this day, we’re creating together, working on a series together, and I will fight tirelessly, in whatever extent I’m able, to see that her world and our collaboration see the published light of day.
By the time I was 16, I had several novel-length fanfics under my belt. Many of the ideas that had played endlessly in my mind since early 2002, and which ultimately reached their final form within the first three Architects novels, took on early, embryonic forms in those fanfics. Don’t get the wrong idea, there was no CTRL+F going on with Architects; all my officially published work was written from the ground up for what it is, and I wouldn’t have been able to sit with myself having done any less. I actually shied away from marketing my published work in/to those communities where I wrote fanfics, because I was afraid of people getting the misconception that these were glorified CTRL+F’ed fanfics rather than something I’d put so many years of time and effort into from the ground up. (Please don’t get me wrong – I have nothing against authors who choose to go that route if they really feel it’s what’s best for them.) I know in hindsight that I probably cost myself some professional momentum by not playing to the places that were already interested in what I was doing, but that’s what over-analyzing your every move will get you.
But no matter how unrecognizable the throughline of ideas might seem at points (or on the nose), I see it, and it is precious to me. Those years saw me diving into early forms of my ‘style’, if you want to call it that, and I’m beyond blessed to have had that ‘incubation ground’ to help me become creatively who I am today.
You might say that this all could have happened in different fan communities, with different groups of people. Sure. But at least in this reality, it didn’t. It happened here, in this way. And for that there are no words that can convey my thanks.
What might life have been like had I been drawn to a community that wasn’t so receptive, so kind, so reciprocal? What if I was just met with apathy or mockery instead of encouragement? I think of the possibilities of what might have been had this thing that released on September 23rd, 2002 not pushed me toward that community in particular, and I find myself incredibly grateful.
The online communities where all this originated are, at this point, deader than dead. That’s what will happen when the makers of a series don’t care for it in the long term. But through it all, I found a lot of things that are worth caring for as long as I live.
Of course, there was always so much more to this than just one series and one community. If I was really to sit down, deep dive and parse out all the individual early inspirations for various elements of Architects, I…could, but we’d be here all day. Stuff like: Talon was originally inspired by Tarantulas from Beast Wars and the Green Goblin from Spider-Man, and he was originally created in early 2002, months and months before any of this stuff I’ve been talking about, as one of my very first characters – though the closest comparison I can come up with in media not written by me, would actually be DC’s The Batman Who Laughs. Though with Elysium Protocol, I finally feel after twenty years like what is presented on the page at-long-last lives up to what I’d hoped he’d be all this time.
And then you have stuff like – this is actually one of the major ways in which Star Fox inspired Architects, so, Eva is like if Samus were a Chozo (shout out to the reader who said that verbatim and I love that forever) but she was originally borne from a lot of the ideas I had about the boundless potential that Krystal had in Star Fox that Nintendo never bothered following up on, and a lot of those ideas I had eventually sort of coalesced into a space bird, as one does, and Eva’s whole character started developing from there. If there’s a lesson to be had from that, it’s that when a narrative ultimately disappoints you by failing to realize its own potential, but it gives you more ideas about how something like that could work, it’s really hard to keep from following that wherever it’s going to lead you.
There’s really no better talisman of what I feel about all these early (and later) influences on me than the final act of Elysium Protocol, which in hindsight feels – more strongly than anything prior in Architects, and that is saying something – like an explosion of all my sci-fi influences wrapped up as one, or like a puzzle-box journey through the stories of that type I held dear to me down the years. You can read through that climax – honestly a feature-length thing in itself – and find inspiration from Star Wars, Mass Effect, Star Fox, Metroid, Doctor Who, Beast Wars, hell, even the 1984 Transformers movie, all wrapped in, on and around each other.
I hope the impact it has is something unique to itself, but I also hope it conveys the echoes of the narrative tradition it’s a part of.
When it comes to the power of art and stories, I am the least cynical person you’ll ever meet. On these grounds, I believe in magic, because I’ve seen too much of it to deny.
I, and every other creator, writer, artist etc. who found themselves buoyed by the media they consumed, are living proof of the fact that stories, art, entertainment matter. Stories and art can spark, inspire, enlighten, and bring us somewhere that sometimes feels far more real than the streets we walk in waking hours. That absolutely goes for you too, even if you haven’t found yourself creating anything (yet!). I’m convinced that the art, stories, entertainment that really captures us, does take us somewhere real in that space between us and the art. Just because it might not be a physical space doesn’t make it any less real.
I think that’s a big reason why I’m planning on taking Architects in such a multiversal direction (and if you’ve read Elysium Protocol, you know I’ve already started): to me, the multiverse is a metaphor for the fact that everything matters. That all the continuity and the stories and the amazing worlds you’ve consumed are not cold, detached things. That everything matters, that themes cross between universes, that the tales we tell are part of something bigger, something infinitely big and infinitely beautiful.
Because if everything matters, then the echoes of what you do will resonate. And creating something is an act of good, putting something creative into the universe instead of taking something away.
And your creation might inspire someone, or many someones. You might foster a community, and – you see this a lot with Youtube channel creators – the vibe you put out as a curator of that community has a lot of sway in whether it’s a warm place where ideas can flow unafraid, or if it’s a cold, caustic place where people fall in line to the party line else they be hammered back in.
And maybe some of those people who have found each other beneath the banner of what you’ve created, will find other people special to them because of – in effect, because of you. Maybe they’ll find someone who is as important to them as the person I mentioned earlier. And they’ll create their own art, maybe inspired by yours directly or indirectly, or maybe just because the community your work fostered gave them the nourishment of spirit to put themselves out there, to create something from the heart, to take their place among the starlight of an endless constellation of creation and inspiration. It shines on us all, reflecting us as we reflect it, an eternal world beyond the world that we carry with us as we navigate this physical world before our eyes.
I don’t want to live without the glow from that starlight. Without music and the universes living between the notes. Without the resonance of ideas all intertwining, informing us, helping us cope, making us smile or scaring us or making us resonate with the hopes and struggles of characters who don’t even exist in this physical universe.
After all, we’re all stories, in the end. And every one of those stories matters, because everything matters.
And this has been my story, so far. Thank you for reading.