Nostalgia remains a powerful force. So much so that exploring the echoes of a late-90s childhood spent skimming the waters of Corneria perfectly describes both playing Star Fox 64 in 1997 and streaming it through Nintendo Switch Online today.
The franchise has been revived through a remake on the Switch 2, but it’s also a series that hasn’t seen an all-new entry since Star Fox Zero on the Wii U. Yet Nintendo’s neglect of the series has been gently offset by indie creators. Ex-Zodiac and Whisker Squadron: Survivor recently provided echoes of Star Fox, and now two upcoming games, Huskrafts’ Rogue Eclipse and Wild Blue Skies from Chuhai Labs, offer hope that this genre may be resurrected.
Though it might be unfair to frame Star Fox‘s absence as abandonment. “It’s true that times have moved on,” Goddard tells The Verge. “Every iteration was a great game for its time,” but now, he suggests, their lasting popularity may be because you don’t see them often. “I think people are starved of originality more than any particular genre or type of game.”
For indie developers hoping to avoid the obscurity of games like Star Fox, that means dealing with risk-averse publishers. “When I was pitching Rogue Eclipse, the response I often got from most publishers was that the genre is dead,” says Huskrafts’ Husban “Mcdoogleh” Siddiqi. It echoes the experiences of others, including Flippfly creative director Aaron San Filippo, who says many publishers “told us they just couldn’t see a big enough market to justify our budget for Whisker Squadron: Survivor.”
Unable to convince publishers to take the leap, developers like Flippfly turn to crowdfunding as a way to revive the genre. This follows crowdfunding success stories like Hollow Knight, Pillars of Eternity, Shovel Knight, and Undertale, which similarly revived underserved genres.
Siddiqi isn’t convinced by arguments that the audience for Star Fox-likes is small. He points to the success of 2019’s Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown as proof. However, an existing audience doesn’t guarantee that if you build it, they will come. In February 2025, Flippfly let its development team go for lack of funding, shelving a more ambitious follow-up to Whisker Squadron: Survivor in the process.
Challenging as funding is, bringing Star Fox-style games back requires capturing what Siddiqi describes as the “push-forward, fast, frenetic, and kinetic approach to combat” that defines the genre in a way that appeals to a modern audience. That’s a challenge for indie developers, but also for Nintendo with its Star Fox 64 remake on the Switch 2.
“Not everyone wants a low-resolution game,” Ben Hickling, developer of Ex-Zodiac, says, adding that others may not want a 240fps reimagining of childhood favorites either. In revisiting underserved genres, there is a balance to be struck between capturing the realities of past games and the rose-tinted memories we conjure.
“I think people are fairly happy with me making Ex-Zodiac more responsive and snappier, as I feel that’s how people remembered the original being, despite that not being the case,” Hickling continues. “To be honest, the whole game is kind of my version of how I imagine Star Fox in my head.”
That’s one approach. Another is to pull from multiple sources. Rogue Eclipse draws influence from Star Fox, but also Armored Core, Mobile Suit Gundam, Returnal, and Battlestar Galactica.
This is echoed further in Chuhai Labs’ approach. Wild Blue Skies, according to director Francis Pétrin, is less about being a Star Fox clone than capturing a broader memory of Saturday mornings in the 1990s. That Wild Blue Skies happens to bear a striking resemblance to Star Fox? “I think we just know how to make one kind of on-rails shooter!” Goddard laughs.
Yet evoking the past is only useful insofar as it supports engaging gameplay. “My blind affection for the past could mean we’re inadvertently bringing baggage or inheriting systems that might be useless for the experience,” he says. “I see this as an opportunity to see if we can solve some of the issues that people may have run into in the past with flight games.”
One approach developers are taking is building on top of the basics that games like Star Fox did so well: making flight feel natural. “What immediately comes to mind is just how effortless and responsive the flight controls were,” Siddiqi says of 2001’s Star Wars: Rogue Leader. “I can still recall, to this day, playing the Death Star Trench mission for the first time. I think it’s one of the reasons why Rogue Eclipse has come to be.”
More pointed is the desire of developers to capture the grand feelings of their own experiences and share them in a visceral, interactive way. Readers of a certain age will hear their own childhoods echoed back when developers talk about their love for the genre, and of days when games were more personally scarce and therefore more impactful.
“When I was a kid living in rural Wisconsin, we didn’t have any gaming consoles, but you used to be able to rent them from the video store,” says San Filippo. “So we’d get them as a birthday treat, and we’d play Star Fox.”
That, Goddard suggests, may well be at the heart of this recent uptick in Star Fox-style games. Much as the 2010s produced a wave of 8- and 16-bit-inspired games, he says, “a generation of people that grew up in the 3D era when these games were more popular now are becoming game developers themselves.”
As much as craving Star Fox-inspired games may feel like looking backward, it’s not all about the past. The downturn has made the gaming industry more risk-averse, for sure, but it’s also pushed it into the conservatism of trend-chasing and homogenization. Increasingly, we’re having to look to the past, and lessons of genuine innovation, to find shreds of creativity and originality. This is most obvious in underserved genres from a gaming world we can’t quite recapture. In returning to Star Fox, we’re mining experiences that feel genuinely new and unique in their absence from a gaming industry that often feels anything but.
“In the end,” Siddiqi concludes, “arcade flight experiences still offer a more playful, exaggerated fantasy gameplay fulfillment that gamers simply may not be able to find elsewhere.”
