company had a solid plan for turning Croc into a multimedia franchise and was familiar to the staff at Argonaut, who were already working on a game for Fox (Alien Resurrection). According to Jez San, the prototype of Yoshi Racing that Argonaut had initially pitched to Nintendo was a large influence towards the creation and development of Super Mario 64, though in a 1997 interview he had stated that it was possible that the similarity between the games was completely coincidental. After being turned down by Nintendo, Argonaut sought the creation of a new character to take the place of Yoshi. Offering to design a new character was young computer artist Simon Keating, who "stumbled" into the game's development as his first job in the video game industry after hearing that the developers of the game needed a new main character. After having sketched out several different potential character designs, Keating ultimately came up with the final design of Croc as a result of Argonaut's request for him to design a character whose design looked marginally similar to that of Yoshi's. According to Keating, Croc was given a single fang protruding from his mouth in reference to his pet house cat at the time who shared the same characteristic. The team came up with the game's plot and the concept of the Gobbos out of a desire to give Croc "something to save" that was not a damsel in distress such as a princess, which the team thought would have been too bizarre for the game's setting and main character. According to Keating, the Gobbos were originally colored pink in early stages of development, but character animator Pete Day later changed the characters' fur color to brown in order to allow them to work better in a 3D environment. Design Croc'''s game mechanics were designed by Keating and lead designer Nic Cusworth. The game's levels were divided into several sub-sections due to hardware limitations at the time and Argonaut's desire to not have to deal with creating convincing depth perception. The team designed the game's levels with the mindset of making each individual room feel like its own individual puzzle that would give the player a sense of accomplishment whenever they completed it. Cusworth came up with the names for many of the levels, several of which were references to other pieces of popular culture; the game's first level, named