Nostalgia remains a powerful force. So much so that, in exploring the echoes of a late-’90s childhood spent skimming the water of Corneria and sneering “cocky little freaks!” in time with a monkey encased in a Gundam suit, I’m simultaneously describing playing Star Fox 64 (Lylat Wars if you’re nasty) in 1997 and streaming it through Nintendo Switch Online today.

The franchise has been revived through a splashy remake on the Switch 2, but it’s also a series that has not 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 offered echoes of Star Fox, and now two upcoming games, Huskrafts’ Rogue Eclipse and Wild Blue Skies from Chuhai Labs — founded by former Star Fox programmer Giles Goddard — offer hope that this desolate genre might be resurrected.

Though perhaps it’s unfair to describe Star Fox’s absence in terms of abandonment. “It’s just that times have moved on,” Goddard tells The Verge. “Each iteration were great games for their time,” but now, he suggests, their enduring popularity may be because you don’t see them much. “I think people are starved of originality more than any particular style or genre of game.”

For indie developers who hope to forestall the obscurity of games reminiscent of Star Fox, that translates to dealing with risk-averse publishers. “When I was pitching Rogue Eclipse, the response I generally received from most labels 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 persuade publishers to take the leap, developers like Flippfly turn to crowdfunding as a means to resuscitate Star Fox. 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-alikes, or more broadly arcade flight shooters, is limited. He points to the success of 2019’s Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown as proof of that (Bandai Namco announced its sequel at The Game Awards 2025). As is often the case, however, an existing audience is not a 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 back from the brink requires capturing what Siddiqi describes as the “push-forward, fast, frenetic, and kinetic approach to combat” that marks its genre in ways that makes sense for a modern audience. That’s a test 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 might not enjoy 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 forgeries, replete with erroneous improvements, that we conjure in our memories.

“I think people are quite happy with me making Ex-Zodiac more responsive and snappier, as I think that’s how people remembered the original being, despite that not being the case,” Hickling continues. “To be honest, the whole game is kinda my version of how I imagine Star Fox in my head.”

That’s one approach. Another is to pull from more than one source. Rogue Eclipse draws influence from Star Fox, but also Armored Core, Mobile Suit Gundam, Returnal, and Battlestar Galactica (to name only a few Siddiqi lists).

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 — games, cartoons, and all — in the 1990s. That Wild Blue Skies happens to bear a striking resemblance to Star Fox? “I guess we only really 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 in baggage or inheriting systems which could be unnecessary for the experience,” he says. “I viewed this as an opportunity to see if we could solve some of the issues that individuals may have come up against in the past with flight games in general.”

One way developers are making that happen is by 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. (Mark Haigh-Hutchinson famously spent a year perfecting its prequel’s controls.) “I can still recall, to this day, playing the Death Star Run mission for the first time. I imagine it’s one of the reasons why Rogue Eclipse has manifested.”

More pointed is the desire of developers to capture the broad shades of their own experiences and share those in a visceral, and interactive, way. Readers of a certain age will hear their own childhoods echoed back at them 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 steady 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 who 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 staring back in time, however, it’s not all about the past. The metamorphosis of collapse has made the gaming industry more risk-averse, certainly, but it’s also pushed it into the greater conservatism of trend-chasing and homogenization. More and more, we’re having to look to the past, and periods of genuine innovation, to find shreds of creativity and originality. This is most obvious in underserved genres from a gaming world we can no longer truly grasp. In returning to Star Fox, we are in fact mining experiences that feel genuinely new and unique for their absence in a gaming industry that often feels anything but.

“Ultimately,” Siddiqi concludes, “arcade flight experiences still offer a more playful, exaggerated fantasy gameplay fulfillment that players simply may not be able to get elsewhere.”