according to programmer peter hastings, the dragon character was originally going to be named "pete", but due to copyright concerns over the name bearing similarities with the disney film "pete's dragon", the name was scrapped. after considering the name "pyro," which was ultimately considered "too mature", they finally settled on "spyro". in-game dialogue was written by peter kleiner, and spyro's character design was done by charles zembillas, who had previously done design work on "crash bandicoot". spyro was originally going to be green, but the developers thought it was a bad idea because he would blend in with grass, so they eventually changed him to purple. during development of "spyro", insomniac had a very close relationship with "crash bandicoot" creator and fellow playstation developer naughty dog, who had their office located directly across the hall from theirs. the two developers would frequently work together, playing early builds of each other's games and later going on to share game technology. as a result, a demo of "" was hidden in "spyro", and vice-versa.