Retro Studios Internal Pitch Star Fox Game Revealed
A video by DidYouKnowGaming made the rounds yesterday. Back in 2013, Eric Kozlowsky, an employee inside Retro Studios, pitched a game idea for "Star Fox Armada", a mission-based Star Fox with a more open world and a heavy emphasis on multiplayer and online interactions. If it had been successful, it would have featured some ideas that ultimately would see an appearance inside games like Starlink and Star Fox Zero. It would have also utilized a graphical style designed to evoke the puppet aesthetic from the SNES game's marketing.
The document presented internally was a skeleton, only pointing out interesting ideas, but lacking a lot of details, as is common for pitch documents. Retro Studio executives found the idea interesting, but ultimately did not do anything with it. According to Eric, what Retro Studios ultimately decides to work on is largely decided externally by Nintendo of Japan. Many other internal pitches were similarly ignored.
Had the pitch gone forward, it would have almost certainly rebooted the series to a point just after the events of Star Fox 64, getting rid of Adventures, Assault, and Command in the continuity (more than half of the series' lore). I think we can all be a little bit glad that this particular pitch was passed over as it would have meant removing a lot of canon, including our beloved Krystal.
It's interesting that he wanted to call it Star Fox Armada. I believe that was the placeholder name for the arcade version of Star Fox under development at the same time as Star Fox Assault for the then-new "Triforce" arcade board. Nothing ever came of this game, however.
DidYouKnowGaming also mentioned that they would be publishing a video about the long-rumored "Star Fox Grand Prix" soon. Last I heard, the racing-based Star Fox game was rumored to have been a trap to figure out what employees were leaking Nintendo secrets, and was never a real game project at all. I guess we'll find out soon.
Comments
Nintendo still can’t understand what their fans want. The StarFox series showed its potential in Adventures, Assault and Command. It is very inappropriate for this universe, which has a good story and various material, to ignore and reset its savings. They probably want to go to the high-selling periods, but I think they would sell better if they listened to the expectations of us who are fans of this series.
Well, we already know Nintendo’s stance on this sort of thing because of what they said about the F-Zero series: They want to innovate with the gameplay. As of yet, in their no-doubt numerous internal experiments with Star Fox, they don’t yet feel that they have a concept that is both innovative and fun enough to finish development and release. They’ll think of one eventually. When they do, as far as the lore goes, they have somewhat written themselves into a corner, since Command is the “end” of the series. Without removing any of the lore, they could still do a prequel with James McCloud, or they could do something between the games, or they could do something with the “next generation” team. I don’t know what they’ll do, but I don’t think maintaining the lore itself is all that important. They care about gameplay. That said, I don’t think they would give up the intellectual property they’ve invested in by making these characters either, so even if they do decide to reboot things, I think they’ll keep the established characters some other way.
Hey Mr. K!
Thank God, I too would not have liked if they completely obliterated the cannon from Adventures onward. I would actually love to see an official spiritual successor / sequel to adventures that takes place on the scattered remnants of Cerinia, and has all of the gameplay mechanics, new vehicles, and more from its predecessor. Imagine diving deep into the oceans of Cerinia with the Blue marine and then having to swim through a narrow trench to access a huge underwater cave filled with crystals to go spelunking in with Krystal and Fox. Stuff like that is what I wanna see in the next Starfox game.
sounds good, but not good enough for nintendo, i guess.