Nintendo on how Star Fox 2 ended up on the Super NES Classic Edition

Had it not been for the Super NES Classic Edition, Star Fox 2 may have been lost to history. The game was never intended to be released after Nintendo canned it due to the impending launch of the N64. That’s despite the fact that Star Fox 2 was essentially complete.

A couple of decades later, Star Fox 2 finally made its debut on the Super NES Classic Edition. Famitsu decided to ask Nintendo how the release happened. In an interview with Famitsu, Kazuhiro Maruyama, Takao Shimizu, and Kazuyoshi Nishi explained the situation.

Siliconera provides the following translation:

Takao Shimizu, Planning and development: From the beginning when we were thinking what we would add to a hypothetical SNES Classic, one of the issues were the titles that utilized the Super-FX chip, such as Star Fox and Yoshi’s Island. Of course, we knew about Star Fox 2, and we were talking about adding those titles if we could emulate the Super-FX chip.

Kazuhiro Maruyama, Hardware development: At the time, we didn’t know if the emulator would work or not.

Shimizu: In the end, we wouldn’t know unless we let NERD (Nintendo European Research & Development) try their hand at it, so they tried to work it out on the side while developing the NES Classic. Something else that was crucial was that we found the completed data for Star Fox 2 that still existed, in both Japanese and English.

Nishi: That really was important.

Shimizu: The source code still existed as well, so we thought we could finally work on it properly. Producer Shimada and the director of Star Fox 2, Eguchi negotiated with Miyamoto, and handed the data to NERD. After that, Super-FX chip emulation started.

Maruyama added that Nintendo went back to see if Star Fox 2 was fun to play and was actually worth bringing back. Shimizu, thankfully, said “the results showed that it was good, so it got included.”