Shigeru Miyamoto had actually teased the existence of Star Fox Adventures at least an entire year before its actual announcement at E3 2001. In an interview with Miyamoto in a February 2000 issue of 64 Dream (so several months before Dinosaur Planet was revealed at E3 2000 that year), he had mentioned that, while a sequel to Star Fox 64 was not currently in development, he'd like to make a game titled "Star Fox Adventures" for the then-coming GameCube. Similarly, in an interview with Miyamoto at E3 2000, when asked about how he felt about Rare's recently unveiled Dinosaur Planet, he had this to say:


Further interviews reveal Star Fox Adventures' origins indeed actually came from within Nintendo in Kyoto, Japan, even before Rare and Dinosaur Planet were involved. Towards the end of the Nintendo 64's lifecycle, Takaya Imamura, who had created Fox McCloud and had been heavily involved with the series since the first game, had begged Miyamoto to let him work on the Star Fox series again. Miyamoto obliged, but had requested for Imamura to instead create an action-adventure title starring Fox as the main character as opposed to a traditional arcade shooter in the vein of Star Fox on the SNES or Star Fox 64. This led Imamura and other Nintendo staff like Kazuaki Morita to begin experimenting with various ideas, like having Fox run around on-foot and shooting down enemies with a gun.

However, with it being a late-stage N64 title, the project was not making much progress as many of the staff were being pulled away to work on bigger projects for the then-upcoming GameCube such as Mario and The Legend of Zelda. This was when Miyamoto noticed Rare was making their own action-adventure game starring Star Fox-esque characters known as Dinosaur Planet. Impressed by their demo at E3, he and other Nintendo staff arranged a meeting with Rare employees to discuss the prospects of merging their similar projects into one, and from there the game that today would be known as Star Fox Adventures would be born.