Writer, Akinori Sao sat down with some of the original F-Zero development team to talk about the game's design, development, and main protagonist, Captain Falcon. During the interview one of the game designers, Takaya Imamura, confirmed that Captain Falcon was actually originally supposed to be the mascot for the SNES.
You can view his exact quote from the interview below:
Sao: 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.
Sao: You didn't think about characters at all during development?
Imamura: No. Captain Falcon was originally the mascot character for Super NES.
Sao: What?!
Shimizu: That statement is a bit shocking, isn't it? (laughs)
Sao: 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.
The conception of Captain Falcon isn't all that's covered in the interview. We also get some new details on Miyamoto's decision to remove invisible walls, also you can hear more about how the original game was something entirely different, and how Nintendo of America didn't like it.
The interview (and a full list of other interviews for games like Star Fox 2, Super Mario World, Yoshi's Island, Super Metroid), were conducted by Nintendo to promote the recently-released SNES Classic. Furthermore, you can check out some awesome concept art of Captain Falcon as well as other images from the time when F-Zero was in development down below.
In other SNES news, the SNES Classic Edition received a new trailer to coincide with the mini consoles launch. Gamestop reported that the console sold out within minutes of release, but more are expected to arrive "very soon."