Rumors that Nintendo is just days away from unveiling a new Star Fox game have been circulating for months, but what is the truth behind the gossip? As Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced recently proved, almost nothing happens in the video game world without first being rumored by multiple sources, mentioned in a job ad, datamined from an existing game, or accidentally confirmed by the publisher prematurely. Things have escalated to the point that even Nintendo rumors are becoming more common.
Neither Mario Kart World nor Donkey Kong Bananza were complete surprises for the Switch 2, and now there is a rumor that a new Star Fox is on the way too. Rather than being an obvious guess based on Fox McCloud’s surprisingly entertaining appearance in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, the implication is that the movie cameo was a purposeful raising of his profile before the announcement of a new game. And yet somehow Shigeru Miyamoto was surprised critics didn’t vibe with the artistic integrity of the film.
The rumors reached the mainstream at the end of March via NateTheHate, who has long proven to be the most reliable of the industry’s various anonymous insiders. He claimed that a new Star Fox will launch this summer and will be announced before the end of May. This was then corroborated by the equally reliable website VGC, as well as guest Alex Donaldson on a subsequent podcast. It is unusual for a rumor with no evidence to have such good sources, but according to NateTheHate, it will be a ‘classic style Star Fox’ with ‘very good’ visuals and some form of multiplayer. No indication of who is making it was given, nor did he explain exactly what ‘classic style’ means, although presumably it implies that at least a portion of the new game will be an on-rails shooter.
That didn’t seem to leave much room for further speculation, especially as subsequent rumors from less reliable sources talked about a reveal in the next few days, which never happened (although Splatoon Raiders was unveiled via the Nintendo Today app, which if there is a new Star Fox game, is likely how it will be announced too).
Over the weekend, French source Oscar Lemaire was widely reported to have said that the summer game is a spin-off and that a second mainline Star Fox game would be released next year. In actual fact, he said nothing about a second game and only speculated that the other one might be a spin-off because of the multiplayer focus. Although NateTheHate vouched for Oscar Lemaire, it was YouTuber Malo932 who first mentioned a second game. He has never previously been a trusted source, but he leaked much of the same information as NateTheHate, as well as a June release date, six days before anyone else. So while most people didn’t hear the news from him, he is technically the original source of the whole story.
Naturally, fans were all over this, and a summary of the whole saga was posted on the Star Fox subreddit by AlphaSSB, who discovered that an Italian YouTuber named Poro Michele may have been contacted by Malo932, who tried to pass him the same or similar information. Although Poro Michele interpreted what he was told as meaning the mainline game planned for 2027 is ‘currently on ice’.
What is Star Fox?
The original Star Fox was released in 1993 for the SNES and was a technical breakthrough for consoles, featuring 3D polygons at a time when most games were solely 2D. The game was essentially a 2D shooter (similar to games like Gradius) extruded out into 3D but still running ‘on rails’, so that you could only move around the screen and not change direction. 1997’s Star Fox 64 (which was the first console game to popularise haptic feedback) was a successful follow-up, including both on rails sections and parts where you could fly anywhere you want. The original two games were extremely successful, but the series quickly fell off after that, as Nintendo shopped it around to external developers, including foisting it on Rare for 2002’s Star Fox Adventures, working with Namco for 2005’s Star Fox: Assault, and bringing in PlatinumGames for 2016’s Star Fox Zero. That was the last time there was any concerted effort to promote the series, beyond the appearance of Fox McCloud, Wolf O’Donnell, and other elements of the games in the Super Smash Bros. series.
It is a more complicated chain of events than it first seemed, but even so, it is a fairly clear timeline that suggests at least three separate sources (Malo932/Poro Michele, NateTheHate, and VGC) all agree that a new Star Fox game is coming out this year. It may be a relatively small-scale game though, and at least one of the sources suggests a bigger budget title could follow next year. The wildcard is Nintendo, who absolutely hate leaks and will do anything to prove them wrong, including changing release dates and even cancelling projects. And yet, if they really did put Fox McCloud in the latest Mario movie just to shill a new game… that is not something you back out of without good reason.
So in all likelihood, there is a new Star Fox game coming out this year. However, it will probably be fairly low budget. Exactly how old school it is going to be is not clear, but the obvious guess is that it will be based primarily on the first two games only (it is worth noting that Star Fox 64 had both full 3D movement, in all-range mode, and four-player competitive multiplayer). The question that has no answer is who is making it, which is difficult to guess as many different developers have worked on the series over the years. A good guess would be Q-Games, which was founded by Star Fox co-creator Dylan Cuthbert and worked on the well-regarded Star Fox Command and Star Fox 64 3D. It wouldn’t be a surprise if a new game was to involve them, but equally it could just be internal Nintendo studio EAD, which co-developed the original and worked on Star Fox 64 on their own.
