Trivia / Star Fox 2

• Executive Meddling: Developer Argonaut Software has stated that the cancellation of Star Fox 2 and the severance of relations thereafter was a deliberate betrayal by Nintendo, who passed on the game despite it being almost complete in favor of focusing on the Nintendo 64. Even the main programmer, Dylan Cuthbert, said that 33% of Star Fox 64's programming was taken from Star Fox 2, and that the camera mechanic was recycled and used in Super Mario 64, all done without paying anything to Argonaut Software. Argonaut's founder, Jez San, also felt like Nintendo and Miyamoto had stabbed them in the back and not shown any sincere regret for it.
  Jez San: They canned Star Fox 2 even though it was finished and used much of our code in Star Fox 64 without paying us a penny.
• Fan Translation: Before its official release, the only way one could play the game in English was via translated fan patches of the beta's ROM.
• The Shelf of Movie Languishment: Nintendo heavily advertised the game before its release, only to cancel it at the last minute when the development for the game was extremely close to being finished.^note According to the development reports, the only thing the programmers had to do was remove the debugging tools. The game wasn't officially released until it was bundled on the SNES Classic, more than 20 years since it was first announced. Interestingly, according to Word of God, Star Fox 2 was used as the test game for the Super FX emulation solution for the SNES Classic, getting its much delayed final certification by successfully emulating on the console.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Had the game been released back in 1995, Star Fox 2 would've represented a radical departure from Star Fox 1 because the core gameplay was non-linear, the team consisted of six instead of four, and transformable Arwings in the second game in the franchise, to name a few, leading some to wonder where the series could've gone if it kept going in that direction.
  • Before Fay and Miyu were decided on, there were many other pilots considered and scrapped, including a gazelle, an ox, a hippo, a robot, a bear, a lemur, a sheep, another rabbit, and oddly enough, a human. Most interestingly, Fara Phoenix from the Star Fox comic strip was also considered, which, if included, would've been the first time a Nintendo game acknowledged a non-game spin-off.
  • Earlier builds had a 2-player battle mode, which was scrapped some time after the 1995 Winter Consumer Electronics Show.

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