Shantae

and development Shantae was created by Erin Bell, the wife of Matt Bozon, the game's creator. In 1994, during their engagement, Erin got a flash of inspiration while coming back from her camp counsellor days, and created the character, naming her "Shantae" after one of the campers, as well as developing her dancing abilities. Matt later asked her what she would come up with if she was to create a video game character, and she introduced him to Shantae. Matt liked the idea and fleshed out the mythology and cast of the game.

Erin imagined that the character could summon or charm animals by belly-dancing. This would later become the basis for the transformation dances. Matt has provided two contradictory stories about how the idea for the hair whip came to be: in one, he said he was inspired by the nine-foot-long hair of his wife, while in the other he claims that Erin's original sketches already featured Shantae using her hair as a weapon. By 1997, Shantae's design was still not completely locked, as she sported brown hair, didn't wear earrings but wore golden bracelets, and had different proportions.

At that point, her magic was still meant to summon animals, her dances were generating magical attacks based on the four elements , and she had different outfits giving her different abilities. By the year 2000, Matt Bozon had locked the final proportions and her ultimate graphical style, adding earrings and replacing the bracelets with wrist guards, and coloring her hair into her signature purple. After the first game, Matt Bozon worked to make the character easier for other people to work with. Her hip sash was progressively removed, and attempts to turn the character into 3-D generated a new batch of issues as her initial appearance had to be revamped to make her look more natural, with her hair in particular blocking the view and needing to move naturally.

Various experiments were done to make her feel more kid-like and heroic, but feedback was mixed, which led to reverting to a look closer to her original one, but with the clothing alterations kept. ] long torso, and black triangular pants" with the main aim being on-screen contrast and readability regardless of the distance from the camera. Her lighter skin on the first sketches in contrast to her former design generated minor controversy, and WayForward worked to fix it later on. Matt Bozon has stated that his main influences for the video game series are Castlevania , Aladdin , Mega Man , The Legend of Zelda , and anime, including Ranma ½ —which he cites as a major influence—and others like Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water , Hayao Miyazaki 's films , and Pokémon , as well as 1980s American cartoons like DuckTales and The Transformers , while Erin Bozon's main influence was I Dream of Jeannie .

The signature catchphrase from the franchise, "Ret-2-Go", was created by a friend of theirs who kept using it when they were working on animation clean up for the Warner Bros. animated film The Iron Giant , and the expression made its way into the script as an inside joke . Matt also elaborated a bit on the development of Sky's character, who was initially named "Twitch" and had a different appearance. She was altered later on in development, and the original Twitch character served as the basis for a similarly-named character and her friend in Shantae and the Pirate's Curse .

Publishers were initially skeptical regarding the character, and asked Matt Bozon to consider switching to a male lead, as they believed male gamers would never play as a female lead character. Matt Bozon stood by Shantae, believing that she "had to exist" to see "if there was an audience reaching back", although, after the game's commercial failure, he later acknowledged that publishers probably "genuinely knew their markets". Despite the initial difficulties, the series' lasting critical appeal led WayForward to adopt Shantae as their official mascot. When asked about whether the Shantae series was conceived as pushing feminist values because of its strong female cast, Matt Bozon acknowledged that he liked to portray the Shantae world as having the girls "run the show" and not be defined solely by their appearances.

While he admitted that most female characters had a deliberately sexy design to them, and the male characters often displayed a variety of weaknesses, he also said that he just liked depicting Shantae's world this way "for no precise reason", and that it was certainly possible that strong male characters could appear later in the franchise's future.