Indie Star Fox Games Are Filling the Gap Nintendo Left Behind

Nintendo hasn’t released an original Star Fox title since Star Fox Zero landed on the Wii U. That’s nearly a decade of silence from one of gaming’s most beloved space-combat franchises — and a handful of indie developers have decided they’ve waited long enough. Star Fox indie games are quietly multiplying, and the people building them are doing so against serious headwinds: sceptical publishers, thin budgets, and the daunting task of modernising a genre that the industry largely wrote off years ago.

• Star Fox indie games are emerging to fill a genre gap Nintendo has left untouched since Star Fox Zero.
• Publishers repeatedly told Star Fox indie games developers the genre was dead, forcing many to turn to crowdfunding.
• Flippfly, maker of Whisker Squadron: Survivor, shut down its team in early 2025 due to a lack of publisher funding.
• Giles Goddard, an original Star Fox programmer, is now leading Wild Blue Skies at his studio Chuhai Labs.

A Genre the Industry Declared Dead

The on-rails arcade shooter was never a huge genre, but Star Fox 64 — released in 1997 and still streaming through Nintendo Switch Online today — gave it a cultural weight that far outlasted its commercial window. The problem is that cultural weight doesn’t automatically translate into publisher cheques. Husban ‘Mcdoogleh’ Siddiqi, the developer behind the upcoming Rogue Eclipse at Huskrafts, found that out the hard way. ‘When I was pitching Rogue Eclipse, the response I generally received from most labels was that the genre is dead,’ he says.

It’s a familiar story. Aaron San Filippo, creative director at Flippfly and the studio behind Whisker Squadron: Survivor, ran into the same wall. Publishers told us they just couldn’t see a big enough market to justify the budget for Whisker Squadron: Survivor. The irony is that the evidence for an existing audience isn’t hard to find. Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown shifted serious numbers when it launched in 2019, enough that Bandai Namco announced a sequel at The Game Awards 2025. Siddiqi points to that as proof the appetite is real — publishers are simply choosing not to see it.

Unable to convince traditional publishers, developers working on Star Fox indie games have largely pivoted to crowdfunding. It’s a well-worn path at this point. Hollow Knight, Shovel Knight, Pillars of Eternity, and Undertale all used crowdfunding to revive genres that the mainstream industry had abandoned, and they all worked out rather well. Whether the same momentum applies to on-rails shooters remains to be seen — but the alternative is simply not making the games at all.

Star Fox Indie Games and the Weight of Nostalgia

There’s a complicating factor baked into every Star Fox-adjacent project: nostalgia is unreliable. The games that players remember and the games that actually existed aren’t always the same thing. Ben Hickling, developer of Ex-Zodiac — one of the more polished Star Fox indie games already available — has thought hard about this distinction. ‘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,’ he says.

That’s a subtle but important point. Hickling isn’t just replicating Star Fox 64 — he’s building the version that players have constructed in their memories over 25 years, which is a slightly better, tighter, more responsive game than the one that actually shipped. ‘To be honest, the whole game is kinda my version of how I imagine Star Fox in my head,’ he adds. It’s less archaeological reconstruction and more creative interpretation — and arguably more honest about what nostalgia-driven design actually involves.

Nintendo itself is grappling with the same tension. The company recently released a Star Fox 64 remake for the Switch 2, which raises its own questions about fidelity versus feel. ‘Not everyone wants a low-resolution game,’ Hickling notes, but he’s equally clear that others won’t want a high-frame-rate reimagining that strips away the original’s rough charm. There’s no clean answer here — just a spectrum of trade-offs that every developer working on Star Fox indie games has to navigate.

Building Something New From Old Blueprints

The more interesting approach — and the one that gives Star Fox indie games the best chance of breaking out beyond nostalgia audiences — is to treat the source material as a foundation rather than a ceiling. Siddiqi’s Rogue Eclipse pulls from Star Fox, yes, but also from Armored Core, Mobile Suit Gundam, Returnal, and Battlestar Galactica. That’s a wide and slightly wild range of influences, and it suggests something with its own identity rather than a straightforward tribute act.

Chuhai Labs is doing something similar with Wild Blue Skies, though the studio’s lineage makes it arguably the most significant Star Fox indie game in development right now. Chuhai was founded by Giles Goddard, who was an actual programmer on the original Star Fox at Nintendo in the early 1990s. The studio’s director Francis Pétrin describes Wild Blue Skies not as a Star Fox clone but as an attempt to capture a broader memory — Saturday morning cartoons, games, the whole fuzzy aesthetic of 1990s pop culture. That Wild Blue Skies looks strikingly like a Star Fox game anyway is something Goddard takes in his stride. ‘I guess we only really know how to make one kind of on-rails shooter!’ he laughs.

Goddard is also candid about the risk of over-indexing on the past. ‘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. It’s a self-aware position that most nostalgic projects don’t bother with — and it suggests Wild Blue Skies is trying to solve problems rather than simply recreate them.

What These Games Actually Need to Get Right

Beyond aesthetics and cultural memory, the core challenge for any Star Fox indie game is flight. Getting the controls right. Making movement feel natural and satisfying before a single enemy appears on screen. Siddiqi points to Star Wars: Rogue Leader from 2001 as a benchmark — a game whose lead programmer Mark Haigh-Hutchinson famously spent a full year perfecting the controls of its predecessor. ‘What immediately comes to mind is just how effortless and responsive the flight controls were,’ Siddiqi says. ‘I can still recall, to this day, playing the Death Star Run mission for the first time.’

That granular recall of a specific moment — not the game as a whole, but one mission, one feeling — is exactly what these developers are chasing. It’s not about recreating a franchise; it’s about recreating a physical sensation. The ‘push-forward, fast, frenetic, and kinetic approach to combat,’ as Siddiqi describes it. That’s the target. Everything else — the art style, the story, the IP — is secondary.

The Stakes Are Real — and Flippfly Proved It

The stakes for Star Fox indie games aren’t abstract. In February 2025, Flippfly laid off its entire development team after failing to secure funding for a more ambitious follow-up to Whisker Squadron: Survivor. The game was shelved. A studio that had successfully shipped one of the better Star Fox-adjacent titles in recent memory couldn’t get the money to build on it. That’s a sobering data point for every other developer working in this space.

San Filippo’s origin story for why Flippfly even exists in this genre is worth sitting with. ‘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,’ he says. ‘So we’d get them as a birthday treat, and we’d play Star Fox.’ Games as rare, precious events rather than abundant commodities — that scarcity gave them a weight that modern gaming almost structurally prevents. The developers building Star Fox indie games today are, in part, trying to bottle that feeling for an audience that mostly grew up on it secondhand.

Whether the market is big enough to sustain them is the question publishers keep asking. But Rogue Eclipse, Wild Blue Skies, and Ex-Zodiac all suggest the genre has more creative energy behind it than the industry’s gatekeepers have been willing to acknowledge. If even one of them breaks through commercially, the calculus changes — and suddenly those same publishers who said the genre was dead will be asking where they can find more.

Source: The Verge

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