The history of Star Fox leading to the Switch 2 game, explained

If you saw Fox McCloud in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, you'd be forgiven if your first thought were, "hey, it's the guy from Smash Bros!" The Star Fox series has struggled to maintain momentum since its inception in 1993, with Nintendo launching fewer Fox games over the series' lifespan than its other major franchises. Even Donkey Kong, abandoned for so long until Bananza, had spin-offs, and the ape made guest appearances in Mario Party and Mario Kart. Not so for Fox. Nintendo didn't alternate releases between handheld and console Star Fox releases like it did for other franchises, and after 2005, there were much longer gaps between launches. Velan Studios' Star Fox remake sees the vulpine mercenary barrel-rolling back onto the scene. It's a muted return after years of silence and stagnation, though there are some signs it's the start of something better.

A Star(Fox) is born

Four years before chunky polygonal Cloud graced tiny CTV screens across the world in Final Fantasy 7, Nintendo and Argonaut (known for its Starglider series of flight sims-slash-shooters) put its own jagged geometrical experiment on the Super Nintendo: Star Fox, one of the company's first 3D games. Even if it looks rudimentary by modern standards, it was a big deal at the time — proof that "old" level design philosophies worked just fine in 3D spaces and that Nintendo was a contender in the graphics department.

It was also an excuse for series creator Shigeru Miyamoto to indulge his love of puppet dramas and animals, hence the elaborate puppets created just for the game's cover art, a style Velan seems to have drawn inspiration from for the Switch 2 game's visual direction.

Star Fox was a success, so after canning Star Fox 2 in 1995, Nintendo made Star Fox again in 1997, but bigger. Star Fox 64 shared the same genetics as Star Fox, but Nintendo added multiplayer, more characters, new missions, and a tank, among other things. The story was also slightly expanded. The evil monkey scientist Dr. Andross, banished to Venom for tinkering with weapons of biological warfare, seduced a mercenary named Pigma with promises of wealth. Pigma betrayed his squad, including James McCloud, father of Fox McCloud, and sabotaged their mission to stop the bad monkey. Andross launches an all-out assault on the Lylat system of planets a few years later, and Fox, at the request of Cornerian military commander General Pepper, takes up his father's mantle, determined to stop the fiend.

Star Fox 64 was met with even warmer reception than its predecessor, though some critics noted that, unlike Super Mario 64, it didn't really do much different compared to the first game. That wasn't exactly true. Star Fox 64 introduced multiple routes (more than two dozen), and over a dozen planets, most with special requirements you have to meet before they unlock. The original only had three routes.

Adventures new

Nintendo and Rare ditched that successful formula and went in a wildly different direction for the next game, 2002's Star Fox Adventures. There's no General Pepper here, no dogfights, not even a flyable Arwing. Fox finds himself on a mysterious planet with warring tribes of dinosaurs and an even more mysterious magical fox girl named Krystal. Adventures shares more in common with something like Spyro the Dragon or The Legend of Zelda than older Star Fox games, a fact that earned it a mix of praise — finally, something different! — and criticism (ugh, why is it so different?).

In 2005, Star Fox Assault brought the merc team back to space with a new story. This time, a bug alien race called the Aparoid is trying to take over the galaxy. Fox and co., now including Krystal, pilot Arwings and Landmaster tanks and — in a nod to Star Fox 64's secret on-foot mission — even leave vehicles behind completely for a few missions. Assault met with criticism for its barebones multiplayer mode.

A year after Assault, Nintendo and (at the time) new studio Q-Games launched Star Fox Command on the Nintendo DS, a strategy game starring Fox and friends. Instead of free flight, you position ships on the touchscreen and hope they're in the right spot, then wait for the enemy to move or attack. It carries the story further — General Pepper retired, and Peppy (one of the original Star Fox members) left the merc life behind to take Pepper’s spot, just in time to deal with another alien race trying to take over the galaxy. Command is notable for telling another new Star Fox story and changing how you play it, while still retaining some of the original games' features, like branching paths.

The age of stagnation

That was the last time Nintendo would be so ambitious with Star Fox. In 2011, the company launched Star Fox 64 3D, which is just Star Fox 64, but with middling stereoscopic features on the 3DS. In 2016, Star Fox Zero took flight for the Wii U, a joint effort between Nintendo and Platinum Games. It's also another Star Fox 64, though Nintendo did at least experiment with new control schemes and even vehicle transformations. Nintendo and Platinum launched Star Fox Guard alongside it, a tower defense-style game criticized for being too short and too bland.

The once-canceled Star Fox 2 reappeared with an official release in 2017 (now playable in the Switch Online SNES Classics library). Despite introducing several features Nintendo later adapted for Star Fox 64, Star Fox 2 is quite different from what came after it. It lets you swap between pilots, gives each ship special abilities, lets you infiltrate enemy ships and destroy them, and even has a real-time strategy element where you try to keep Andross' forces from invading Corneria. Star Fox went silent for 10 years after that.

Now, in 2026, we have Star Fox, which is very much continuing the series' tradition of "being Star Fox 64 again with a few tweaks." The story is largely the same as ever: Evil Andross launches a war on the solar system, and Fox steps in to stop it. Earlier games, and a comic series, expanded on the galaxy's lore a bit, giving background information to planets like the industrial giant Macbeth. (Yes, you read that right; no, Shakespeare wouldn't approve.)

It wasn't much — just flavor text mostly, like saying the CEOs of Macbeth were too busy fighting each other to ward off Andross. Now, though, it seems like Nintendo and Velan are keen to dig deeper into the galaxy's storytelling potential. There's a whole submenu with lengthy lore entries about each location, and entries that go into much more detail than before. Nintendo's plans for the series remain uncertain, but with this renewed interest in Star Fox's story and characters, it seems like it may be setting the stage once again for a bigger, better future.