Back in the day, White Dwarf magazine was the British answer to the Dragon, and its regular "Fiend Factory" column was a source of many monsters for early D&D games. In fact, the first edition Fiend Folio (1981) was largely a collection of monsters submitted to WD. This 3e conversion is part of an ongoing project to resurrect some interesting WD monsters that, for one reason or another, fell by the wayside. The white ape was a submission of Brendan Bulger and appeared in "Fiend Factory: Near Misses" from White Dwarf 27 (Oct/Nov 1981). This Fiend Factory was the third of three articles detailing monsters that, for one reason or another, were cut from the original Fiend Folio.

The white ape was evidently cut due to its too-close resemblance to a monster from the Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter, Warlord of Mars novels—though Bulger did manage to sneak at least one Barsoomian monster into the Fiend Folio: the ulsio, also known as the osquip. Despite this, a variant of the white ape did end up in 3e D&D after all, as the girallion. Game designer Sean K. Reynolds has also posted an interesting, independent version of the Barsoomian white ape on his website.