Star Fox Gets Disappointing 30th Anniversary Update
When it comes to forgotten gaming franchises, Nintendo is one of the worst culprits for letting its IPs wither on the vine while it focuses on Mario, Pokemon, and Zelda. Away from F-Zero, Wario Land, and EarthBound, let's spare a moment to pay tribute to Star Fox.
While Fox McCloud has been a staple of every Smash Bros. game, the legacy of his own series has died a death. The complicated release of the canned SNES Star Fox 2 brought things full circle in 2017, but since then, the Arwing has been in the shop.
What's Going On With Star Fox?
It's hard to believe it's been 30 years since we first booted up the original Star Fox on the SNES, and with Fox McCloud once being a poster boy for Nintendo, the gaming giant is looking back at our furry friend.
Takaya Imamura is known for designing the likes of Fox, Falco, and Slippy Toad. To honour three decades of Star Fox, he took to Twitter to share artwork of McCloud. The official Nintendo accounts have also been tipping their hats to the spacefaring series, but players aren't happy.
With Star Fox being marooned in space for so long, the comments were soon filled with angry gamers asking what was going on with the IP.
When Nintendo of Europe celebrated the anniversary, one critic said, "Cool. Why don't you celebrate the 30th anniversary with a new game?" Another added, "The only Star Fox mention for 2023."
A third lamented, "Nothing new for Star Fox to celebrate 30 years? Remasters of the GameCube titles would be brilliant," while someone else concluded, "Sure would be nice if a new Star Fox came out on Switch for the 30th anniversary."
What's Going On With Star Fox?
Sadly, Star Fox has been resigned to the background of the Nintendo Switch Online subscription. There's been no solid word on a Star Fox revival, but as Nintendo reportedly turned down an ultra-realistic F-Zero, we're not sure there's much love for the old crowd over at the House that Mario built.
The last "new" Star Fox release was back in 2016 when Star Fox Zero made a crash landing on the Wii U. On Zero's sixth anniversary in 2022, Imamura called for the game to be ported to the Nintendo Switch (via VGC), however, nothing has happened yet.
At least the name lives on in us. Q-Games CEO Dylan Cuthbert worked on the original Star Fox when at Argonaut Software, and to celebrate all things Star Fox, he got a massive cake featuring McCloud and his pals.
As Nintendo hypes the next mainline Mario game and the long-awaited Metroid Prime 4, here's hoping the eventual arrival of more Star Fox games via NSO will remind fans why the franchise is great and lead to some sort of animal-based Star Wars Squadrons-inspired revival.
