Star Fox 2 being released on the Super Nintendo Classic Edition has the Nintendo faithful all in a tizzy, especially the ones who have been alive long enough to have been looking forward to it on the Super Nintendo. After twenty years of waiting, we’re finally going to legitimately play this long lost sequel, and nobody is more shocked about it than the original developers.
Dylan Cuthbert, now making Pixeljunk games over at Q-Games, was one of the original programmers for Star Fox and Star Fox 2 back when he worked for Argonaut Games. He reunited with his team following the announcement of the Super Nintendo Classic Edition, and the group celebrated learning that their work would finally pay off a full twenty years later.
In addition to getting the band back together for one of those crazy izakaya nights, Cuthbert also gave a brief interview to Kotaku, saying that the announcement brought him much joy. Star Fox 2 was canceled because Sony and SEGA had managed to outperform the Super Nintendo’s limited 2D capabilities by 1997, not exactly hard to do.
I agree that strategically (if not emotionally) it was the correct decision. But now our older retro form of 3D is the new cool kid on the block, it’s perfect timing!
It was a pretty cool engine and had a lot of features. I’d expand the scripting engine we had to allow more complex expressions. I did this for the next engine I wrote for Blasto on the PlayStation and expanded the scripting engine heavily in that direction with some great results.
This is a Holy Grail of gaming for a good many of us, and even if Star Fox 2 is just a prototype, we can finally close the book on one of the longest pieces of vaporware in gaming history. Congratulations to those who worked on the game. I hope those beers are cool and delicious.
