Mauro Fonseca

worth remembering the left and rightmost guys here are meant to be directly the same design, the magazine just coloured him white and red

my guess is just Ohshima found the name cool (which to be fair I feel Max was overall globally considered a cool name around that time- there's a reason Goofy's son is named such in Goof Troop) and kept trying to find a way to use it lol.

oooh it's either evan or nat haines' call on mika's design, I just drew her in the bg later lol. so I'm not the best person to ask, especially since I'm also not that familiar with the other vocaloids. considering mika is not meant to literally be max the rabbit's design but is just inspired in it, maybe they'd all look like him just in different colours and ear positionings? or maybe they'd be based on other sonic 1 concept characters

that seems an obvious choice. another one would be trying to reverse the pun instead. she's called cream because "cream cheese". what other things would work with "cheese"? maybe they'd be named like "string" and "grilled" lol