As Star Fox arrives on the Switch 2, critics and fans alike joke and bemoan how many times it's already been remade, or that the whole series is just the same game over and over again. That's a bit ungenerous, like saying that the Zelda games are just the same story (to be fair, that series is essentially about a legend that is retold, but also reinvented each time). Which isn't to say that this new Star Fox isn't a remake, because it is specifically a remake of Star Fox 64 (or Lylat Wars as it was known in PAL territories), which was remade previously for the 3DS as Star Fox 64 3D.
Nintendo, of course, is not the only publisher a bit too complacent with reheating its back catalogue, with Halo also getting a remake this summer while Naughty Dog's done nothing this generation but give its last-gen masterpieces a new lick of paint. But there's almost an audacity in bringing back Star Fox in 2026. An on-rails shooter where you can roll credits in under an hour is as old-school as you can get, even if this remake's new cinematic cutscenes will go some way to beefing up the runtime. Of Nintendo's roster of beloved IPs, it's perhaps the one that's most stuck in time.
Yet this would also be rather dismissive of its history and of the fact that Star Fox remains one of Nintendo's most technologically groundbreaking games. More importantly, it's one that happened because of talent outside of the Japanese company.
British extractions
While Nintendo's most beloved IP originated from its Japanese developers, notably Shigeru Miyamoto, Star Fox stands out as a game that wouldn't have been possible without importing a few whizz-kids from the UK. Argonaut Games already had a reputation for making cutting-edge 3D games on home computers, such as the vector-based Starglider.
The company would be responsible for making the very first 3D games on a Nintendo platform, though the most remarkable thing was that the very first was on the ridiculously low-tech Game Boy. X, a first-person space combat sim, was the work of programmer Dylan Cuthbert, who extraordinarily produced a 3D engine by reverse-engineering the Game Boy hardware. Once Nintendo caught wind of the project, it became an official first-party release, though it was ultimately released only in Japan, as the game was considered too complex for a wider handheld audience.
From there, a more official partnership began, and Argonaut had more expertise and influence over how a 3D game for the SNES should look. While Nintendo's 16-bit console had the Mode 7 graphics mode that created a pseudo-3D effect, as seen in games like Pilotwings and F-Zero, Argonaut's founder, Jez San, argued that custom hardware was needed to render real 3D polygons. This led to the creation of the Super FX chip, a powerful 3D graphics accelerator included in the Star Fox game cartridge, while Argonaut programmers Cuthbert and Giles Goddard (the latter becoming one of Nintendo's first Western employees) were flown out to Japan to develop the game in Nintendo's Kyoto office.
In retrospect, Star Fox's 3D graphics might seem primitive, yet even then there's a simplicity to the design of the Arwing spacecraft you piloted, so much so that, even in modern iterations, its iconic shape and colours are still recognisable. This was also still a game that had Miyamoto's fingerprints, and so much of its charm came from his own inspirations, including visits to Kyoto's Fushimi Inari Shrine, where its numerous Torii gates gave him the idea for players to fly through gates in the game, and how he came up with a fox as the game's protagonist (Inari is a Japanese deity associated with foxes).
Puppet nostalgia
Indeed, it's the animal characters of Star Fox, including Fox McCloud and his wingmen Peppy Hare, Falco Lombardi, and Slippy Toad, designed by Takaya Imamura, that have remained just as memorable as the series' arcadey gameplay. While their appearances have evolved with each iteration, from pixel art portraits in the original game to their low-poly incarnations in Star Fox 64, I still think their standout representation comes from another of Miyamoto's ideas with a British connection.
For Star Fox's box art (or Starwing as it was renamed in PAL regions) and other promotional campaigns, puppets were created for Fox and his crew, primarily because Miyamoto was a fan of British 60s puppet shows (or 'Supermarionation', as coined by its creator Gerry Anderson). Compared to the US box art, which shows just puppet Fox by himself, the PAL version shows the whole Arwing crew together in a pose that even resembles that of the Thunderbirds cast.
While Star Fox's art direction has changed in different iterations, such as a more stylised approach in Star Fox 64 3D, the puppet aesthetic has remained so iconic that new puppets were even made for promoting Star Fox Zero on the Wii U. It's partly what I think the latest remake is sort of going for. While most of the criticism has been over the new designs leaning too close to the characters' real animal counterparts, giving the kind of uncanniness of a CG live-action film, when I see Fox's more fox-like features or Falco's more bird-like feathers, my mind casts back to those original puppets, which developer Velan Studios was surely channelling.
Barrel-rolling into old genres
As inventive as the first Star Fox was, with its diverging paths that added variety to its short, arcadey runtime, that kind of design ultimately has shortcomings. It's not that Nintendo didn't seek to change things up, as its sequel Star Fox 2 had been designed to be more ambitious, including a real-time strategy element and even free-roaming 3D, a mind-boggling possibility at the time.
Yet it ended up being scrapped (it would fortunately see the light of day as a bonus game on the SNES Mini before being added to the Nintendo Switch Online SNES library) in favour of sticking to the original formula. Star Fox 64 was initially designed as a port of the original Star Fox, though the final result was far more fleshed out, with more meaningful branching paths and even incorporating some of the free-roaming envisioned in Star Fox 2.
Essentially, Star Fox 64 fully realised the original game's vision, which had been held back by the SNES's constraints. But it was also so perfectly executed that it's perhaps why it's now been remade twice. The one attempt to reimagine it resulted in the divisive Star Fox Zero, owing to an insistence on having a flawed control scheme designed around the Wii U gamepad.
It's interesting to note that there was no mainline Star Fox game on the GameCube, perhaps because the sublime-looking Star Wars: Rogue Leader had already comfortably filled the gap for any space-shooting fantasies. Yet the characters' popularity ensured we'd still see Fox spinning off into several other games.
The most notable was Star Fox Adventures, developed by longtime collaborator Rare (another British connection), which actually started out as an original IP called Dinosaur Planet. While it was undoubtedly a graphical leap from Star Fox 64, notably in Fox's fur textures, it was also a very derivative, Zelda-like game that deviated too much from what fans expected of Star Fox, with its Arwing sections little more than a way to get from A to B.
Namco tried to mix things up with Star Fox Assault, which featured traditional Arwing dogfights but also included the much less welcome on-foot sections that made for an awkward third-person shooter. Ironically, the most successful spin-off for Star Fox's characters in this generation was Super Smash Bros. Melee, a fighting game still played today, where both Fox and Falco are considered the strongest characters in the all-star roster.
So as this new Star Fox approaches, it may be the safest bet when you consider the other so-so attempts to reinvent the series. Still, given that the Switch 2 has more juice for it to be envisioned as a cinematic adventure through Velan Studios' own custom Viper engine, and other ways to leverage hardware features, including mouse controls, GameChat avatars, and the first game in the series with online multiplayer, I feel that there may be more to this return than just another retread.
Star Fox launches on Nintendo Switch 2 on 25 June, and you can play a free demo now.
