Splatoon ’s colorful inkling characters started out as bland, white boxes. During early prototypes of the game, these rectangular characters — which the development team at Nintendo started calling blocks of tofu — would shoot black-and-white paint at each other in a simple arena. Eventually, as the game started to evolve, so did the character design. At first, Nintendo toyed with the idea of using familiar faces like Yoshi or Mario, but the game was so different from the company’s previous