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If you don’t count the release of the canceled-at-the-last-minute Star Fox 2, which debuted on the Super NES Classic Edition in 2017, Nintendo’s Star Fox series has been dormant since the release of Star Fox Zero on the Wii U in 2016. Now, the original Star Fox’s co-programmer, Giles Goddard, is offering insight on what he would do were he to ever work on a new entry in the series.
“I think I would just dial it back a lot and not put in gimmicks like, you know, the stuff Star Fox Zero had, and maybe not even put in the free roaming aspects and stuff like that,” Goddard says in a new interview with GameXplain. “I would just bring it back, pull it back into what made the original Star Fox fun, and just make one based on that. I don’t know how popular it would be, but it would be cool to try.”
Star Fox Zero, co-developed by Platinum Games, released to mediocre reviews, with critics and players criticizing the game’s Wii U GamePad functionality, which required them to aim weapons using the GamePad’s gyroscopic controls. The game was bundled at launch with Star Fox Guard, a tower-defense-esque game also co-developed by Platinum Games in which players monitored security cameras in an effort to defend a base from robotic enemies.
Goddard goes on to say he wouldn’t attempt to replicate the polygonal, Super-FX chip look of the original Star Fox, saying he didn’t see the point.
“You don’t go back that far, you know,” he says. “We’ve fixed that problem, you don’t want to go back to it.”
Goddard worked on numerous Nintendo games over the years, including 1080° Snowboarding for the Nintendo 64, which he says legendary Nintendo game designer Shigeru Miyamoto originally envisioned as a skiing game. Miyamoto argued skiing was more popular, which Goddard countered by saying that while that was true, snowboarding was cooler and allowed for more jumps and tricks that weren’t possible on skis. The rest, as they say, is history. Goddard’s work on 1080° Snowboarding helped inspire his latest project, the recently released Carve Snowboarding for the Oculus Quest.
While no word of a new Star Fox game surfaced at Nintendo’s 2021 E3 Direct presentation, the company is set to release new entries in at least two classic series with Metroid Dread, a game originally planned for the Nintendo DS, and Advance Wars 1+2: Reboot Camp, a remake of the first two games in the turn-based-strategy series.
