Star Fox

Star Fox, released in PAL regions as Starwing, is a 1993 rail shooter for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System developed by Argonaut Software Ltd.? and published by Nintendo, and the founding title of the long-running Star Fox series.⁴ Players pilot Fox McCloud? in his Arwing fighter through space and planetary areas, gunning down enemy ships with lasers and nova bombs, dodging fire, flying through narrow gaps, and battling bosses.⁴ Three wingmen — Slippy Toad, Falco Lombardi, and Peppy Hare — accompany the player, who must in turn cover their backs, while branching routes let the player choose among easy, medium, and hard pathways.⁴

The game is best remembered for introducing Nintendo’s Super FX? chip, a coprocessor that rendered polygonal 3D graphics — a rarity for the time — alongside voice effects and a full musical score.⁴ Beyond its two hidden levels and warps, the game features power-ups to collect; contemporary reviewers rated the gameplay smooth despite noticeable slowdown, and praised a design accessible to players of varying skill.⁴

Development and the Super FX chip

Argonaut Software was founded as a software consultancy in the early 1980s by Jez San?, who at eighteen co-wrote the book Quantum Theory and programmed the firm’s first game, Skyline Attack, on the Commodore 64.⁵ San earlier developed StarGlider on the Amiga?, a commercial success considered by many the first popular 3D computer game, which helped finance Argonaut’s growth.⁵ After signing a multi-game exclusive deal with Nintendo, Argonaut demonstrated vector and polygon graphics running in software on the NES and SNES, hardware Nintendo had thought incapable of real-time 3D.⁵

Argonaut proposed designing dedicated hardware, promising Nintendo the SNES could be made ten times faster at 3D polygon graphics.⁵ The company hired hardware engineers and designed the chip from a software-first perspective — writing the intended software before building the hardware to run it — and the resulting prototype ran forty times faster than the SNES software 3D library.⁵ The Super FX was a microprocessor built to run graphics software that also handled fast math; internally the team joked the SNES was merely the power supply for the chip, since game code, 3D graphics, physics, and gameplay all ran on the Super FX while the console displayed the results.⁵ It became the first 3D chip for a home game system and sold well over ten million units.⁵ San’s dual pursuit of hardware and software led Argonaut to spin its hardware group off into a separate company, ARC, a co-design approach the firm carried further in later years.⁵

Shigeru Miyamoto designed the original game and was responsible for its basic game design, describing it as a challenge to push the limits of the SNES hardware.⁷ When shown to observers, some reacted to the polygonal ships and buildings by asking, “Uh, what’s with the triangle?” — the team saw the polygon shapes as parts of a ship or building rather than flat triangles.⁷ Miyamoto later acknowledged that realistic, floating-feel aiming and shooting proved difficult to achieve on the Super NES, a shortcoming he sought to address in the sequel.⁷ Reflecting on the series, he professed no deep attachment to the Star Fox theme, framing the original above all as a technical experiment.⁷

Setting and inspiration

The team drew on Japanese folklore and shrines in shaping the cast.¹⁶ Fox McCloud arose from Miyamoto’s fondness for the Fushimi Inari-taisha?, a shrine at the base of the Inari Mountain in Japan, where foxes are messengers of the deity Inari.¹⁶¹⁷ The animal cast of fox, hare, toad, and bird has been linked to tales such as one in the Konjaku Monogatarishū, a Japanese anthology of over a thousand stories, in which a rabbit befriends a fox and a monkey.¹⁶ Alongside the folkloric roots, the series took inspiration from Star Wars?, a parallel later reviewers found its most visible influence.¹⁸¹¹

Star Fox belonged to a lineage of early 3D shooters; contemporary accounts held that it was influenced by first-person 3D arcade games such as Space Harrier?, which reached arcades in 1985, and which was itself influenced by Zaxxon? and Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom?, both released in 1982.⁴ Its story pits Fox and his elite mercenary squadron against enemy forces bent on conquest, casting the player as a hired pilot rather than a heroic royal in the mold of Nintendo’s other leads.⁴

Sequels and legacy

The sequel, Star Fox 64?, was released for the Nintendo 64? in 1997.⁴ Miyamoto, credited as its producer, estimated that roughly 60 percent of Star Fox 64 came from the original game, 30 percent from the unreleased Star Fox 2 for the Super NES — including its All-Range mode, multiplayer, and Star Wolf scenarios — and 10 percent was entirely new.⁷ He described Star Fox 64 as a remake pursued for the sake of an interesting game design rather than a new story, and noted that giving Fox a speaking part with real-time voice dialogue was a significant experiment for the team.⁷ In the same interview he framed the game as a “movie-like” experience, borrowing dramatic camera work and voices from cinema while insisting games remained an active rather than passive medium.⁷

The series has since spanned numerous entries and studios, including Star Fox Command? on the Nintendo DS? developed by Q-Games, GameCube collaborations with Rare and Namco, and Nintendo’s own Star Fox Zero? during the Wii U era.¹⁴ Commentators have often held that the franchise never surpassed its 64-bit entry, though later installments served as a test bed for varied design ideas, from the tactical play of Star Fox Command to the GamePad-centered spin-off Star Fox Guard.¹⁴

The original game has been made available through the Super Nintendo Entertainment System – Nintendo Switch Online? service, part of the classic Super NES library playable on Nintendo Switch with a paid membership.⁶

In 2026 Nintendo released a Star Fox remake exclusively for the Nintendo Switch 2, a reimagining of Star Fox 64 with reworked cutscenes, fully voiced dialogue, an orchestral soundtrack, a new Challenge mode, and revamped four-versus-four multiplayer.¹²¹³ IGN’s Jada Griffin called it the best twenty or so hours of Star Fox she had played, praising its branching sixteen-stage structure and score-chasing depth while faulting the compact multiplayer, which offered four-versus-four deathmatch across only three maps.¹² Griffin noted that a full seven-mission run might last an hour or less, but that seeing every path and earning every medal on normal and expert difficulty took about ten hours.¹² A preview described the remake as a cinematic retelling of the Lylat Wars with strong voice acting, likening the tone to “Star Wars: A New Hope with Animals,” and observed that returning to a traditional control scheme after the Wii U’s motion-based controls brought a sense of relief.¹¹ The 2026 remake earned an 8.6 user rating on IMDb, where it is credited to director Dan Doptis and writers Nick Eliopulos and Heath Gartner.¹⁵