A few months ago, Argonaut Games announced a new remastered version of Croc: Legend of the Gobbos, one of the most beloved 3D platformers on the original PlayStation. Since then, the studio has been constantly posting updates on its official Twitter/X account.
But one of Argonaut Games’ most recent posts revealed a fascinating new piece of information about the development process of Croc: Legend of the Gobbos: Croc was at one point going to be a dragon instead of a crocodile. But that’s not the full story.
Argonaut Games will include an Encyclopedia (or “Crocipedia”) in the new remaster, which will feature never-before-seen concept art that the studio discovered after its recent rebirth. It already revealed drawings and test animations of Croc as a small, anthropomorphized dragon with wings from December 1996.
Considering that the animations look almost completed and that Croc: Legend of the Gobbos came out less than a year later, it’s most likely that this old version of the character got pretty far into development. Curiously enough, Spyro the Dragon, another classic PS1 platforming game starring a small dragon, came out in September 1998, which explains why Argonaut Games made a tongue-in-cheek reference to him in its original post.
And before that, Croc: Legend of the Gobbos was going to be a Yoshi game
Remarkably, this wasn’t even the first prototype version of Croc that the studio scrapped before the release of the game. Back in the early 90s, Argonaut Games had a close relationship with Nintendo after it helped develop the original Star Fox for the SNES. At one point, the studio created a concept for a brand-new 3D platformer starring Yoshi and pitched it. As impressive as it was, Nintendo didn’t want to let another company use its IP (not to mention that it was already working on Super Mario 64 at this point), so it rejected the concept, even though the pitch had apparently impressed Shigeru Miyamoto himself.
This rejection and the cancellation of the almost completed Star Fox 2 marked the end of the partnership between Argonaut Games and Nintendo. Not wanting to let go of this brilliant concept, the studio repurposed its rejected Yoshi 3D platformer, transformed it into Croc: Legend of the Gobbos and released it on the PlayStation 1. So now we all know that Croc was originally going to be Yoshi, and he was later turned into a dragon before ending up as the adorable crocodile we all know and love.
