Splatoon Proves That The Best Ideas Come From Outside Video Games

Splatoon is celebrating its 10-year anniversary today, May 28, 2025. Below, we examine how it reached outside the realm of video games for its unique blend of inspirations.

It is easy to understand Splatoon as a riff on prior video games. It's a multiplayer shooter produced in the years after competitive shooters started to dominate online play. But it subverts type, offering something tuned for children and families, rather than teens and young adults. Its cartoon style and emphasis on objectives other than "kill" or "hold this position" set it apart from most other games of its ilk. But Splatoon's originality goes deeper. It proves that the strangest and most exciting ideas emerge when you look outside of regular avenues of video games, like wildlife, pop music and street fashion, and borrow what you can from them.

Nintendo didn't start development of Splatoon with the intention to make a family-friendly multiplayer shooter. Former CEO Satoru Iwata said in an interview the developers wanted to create "a new kind of game, without worrying about trying to fit into existing game genres." From that initial seed came 70 ideas, which the team narrowed down to Splatoon. Its unique flavor comes in part from that wide-open approach. To be fair, this is an interview for promotional purposes, conducted by Nintendo employees with an active stake in making the best impression possible. Who knows how much of this is the unvarnished truth? But it is still striking how little video game terminology shows up and how many of the design questions raised are ones of intuition and common sense.

When you look at Splatoon's finished product, every portion of it fits together, from how its squid characters hide in ink and how its paint-splattering mechanics pair with street art aesthetics. But it took a lot of careful thinking and iteration to get it that way. The first design that captured the dev team's imagination featured characters covering a battlefield in ink, but these characters were tofu blocks, not squid. Why tofu? Well, the tofu's block shape and simple colors made it disappear into the ink, turning the straightforward shooter into a tense cat-and-mouse game.

But the tofu was a problem. The lack of any human features made it feel silly. How could you market a game with tofu characters? At first, the team settled on rabbits, for a number of practical reasons. Their stark color palettes would make it easy to see when they'd been inked and their ears act as a simple visual marker of the direction they were looking. There was only one problem: rabbits didn't make any sense. Co-director Yusuke Amano said, "When people asked 'Why rabbits?' and 'Why are the rabbits shooting ink?' we couldn’t give them a rational explanation." After brainstorming a number of things characters needed to have in the game--including "a motif where it makes sense for it to be squirting ink"--the team settled on squids.

Now the game's characters felt reasonable, but the new design also created new ideas for gameplay. The squid's ability to swim through the ink enabled traversal on the walls to flank enemies. This intuitive approach extends to the rest of the game. Splatoon can get complex, but the weapons resemble water guns, aerosol cans, buckets, paint brushes and rollers, things most of Splatoon's player base have used or have seen used in their real lives. There is an immediacy to how those tools work that makes them appealing. Even more intuitive shooters like Halo still rely on some prior knowledge of firearms. You don't need that in Splatoon.

Spreading ink on walls and floors also brings graffiti and, by extension, street fashion to mind. The team made that connection before they settled on squid characters. Part of what makes each of the three Splatoon games wonderful is how they draw on specific, sometimes local, subcultures. Diving into the fashion that inspired Splatoon will take you from the monochrome runway looks of designer Youji Yamamoto to the iconographic style of artist Sk8thing. Scrolling through this brief history of Tokyo neighborhood Ura-Harajuku and its streetwear will showcase looks and locations that could be found in Inkopolis. The games' Squid girl idols pull from digital pop stars like Hatsune Miku, even as they also take from the real world of American Hip Hop. These influences give the game a style that extends beyond its own borders. Getting into Splatoon could be, and for many players has been, a gateway to lots of other cool stuff.

In a strange way, Splatoon anticipated Fortnite, with its emphasis on player-chosen aesthetics, seasonal community events, and cartoonish, kid-friendly vibes. But in another sense, the difference could not be more stark. Fortnite wants to be everything to everyone: a platform for music festivals, movie trailers, and entirely new games. It eats everything from Star Wars and Marvel to Sabrina Carpenter and Ariana Grande. Meanwhile, every Splatoon game has had big, final Splatfests after which the game no longer runs events. Fortnite's malleable plastic aspirations have spread to every multiplayer game, while Splatoon remains its own thing, even with the occasional Nintendo tie-in.

However, Splatoon can still be craven. In Splatfests, teams of players pick sides in weekend wars between teams like "Pirates vs. Ninjas" or "Early Bird vs. Night Owl." The intention was to bring social media attention to the game by using common keyphrases and cultural debates. But that also has the effect of grounding Splatoon in subcultures outside itself. Splatfests create a normalcy and routine that each new event both affirms and disrupts. They are naked attempts to boost player numbers and generate free advertising. But when they're at their best, Splatfests feel like block parties.

Which brings us to Splatoon's run at social media. As you explore Inkopolis, you can find drawings and scrawlings from other players. You can still find posts like this if you walk around in Splatoon 2 or 3. Though the system draws from the interfaces of Instagram and Twitter, there is no algorithm to tailor what you see. The town square can only show you what people are saying right now. The result is something immediate and buzzy, but it can't hold your attention long-term.

All these pieces come together to create perhaps the most profound element of Splatoon: the feeling of a particular time and place. Splatoon’s aesthetics are not vacuous imitations, but grounded homages. Its social media and events give the feeling of a world beyond the borders of the game. Splatoon feels like a real place, albeit one that you can only ever visit. That is because it only could have been made by that team at that time in that place. In 2015, we were on the verge of a wholly different gaming ecosystem. Fortnite Battle Royale was only two years away. Splatoon’s emphasis on avatar customization and seasonal events put it in immediate conversation with what was to come. Yet it could not be more different. Splatoon’s seasonal events had a definite end-date. It lacked endless cross-media promotion (outside of the occasional Nintendo crossover). It did not chase everyone, everywhere, all of the time, but was instead content for a dedicated audience for that moment.

Befitting all that, Splatoon was not a well of endless entertainment. Its servers have long been down. You can't play the game that people played back in 2015. That death weirdly echoes Splatoon’s narrative of a post-apocalyptic world where humans have long been gone. The squid people wear clothes like the clothes humans wore, play games like the humans played, and make the same kind of music they made too. There are differences, but it is the same too. Perhaps that squid world will die, like the human world did, but wasn't it beautiful while it lasted?