It was announced today that the never-before-released Star Fox 2 is one of the 21 games included in the Super NES Classic, due to hit shelves (hopefully widely) on September 29.
IGN Japan got the chance to have a quick chat with the game's programmer (and now head of Q-Games) Dylan Cuthbert about the surprising announcement, the differences between the Super NES Classic version of the game and the various leaked builds that are available online, and the challenges of developing Star Fox 2 before Nintendo officially pulled the plug on it 22 years ago. Check out our interview with Cuthbert below.
IGN: It was a surprise to see a release for Star Fox 2 announced with the SNES Classic! Were you involved in this version at all or was it a surprise to you too?
Dylan Cuthbert: All a big fantastic surprise - awesome news! I think it is the main selling point of the new SNES classic - that and the original Star Fox finally getting a re-release!
Do you know whether the game will be identical to the one you made all those years ago or has it been changed in some way? I believe the game was only 95% complete when you finished working on it, but what was left to do for the final 5%? Were you involved in any new tweaks?
I have no idea, but we mastered it up completely back in the day, internationally too - I presume it will be that mastered version? It is one of those games that got fully completed but then due to market changes was shelved.
I recall that when the Wii U Star Fox came out, you mentioned that it used some ideas that were taken from Star Fox 2. What were these features? Are they implemented differently in SF2?
Star Fox Command uses ideas from Star Fox 2, and even the Nintendo 64 version takes a few things from it too. I mean, the gameplay is really quite different and unique, each time you play you get a different storyline and it's more encounter and puzzle based. There are over a hundred scenarios I seem to recall.
I believe some other ideas had also wound up in Star Fox 64 and Star Fox Command. Is there anything left in Star Fox 2 that will be a complete surprise to players today?
The unique replay feature - i.e. it's designed so you play it multiple times, each time getting a different game and discovering new things as you go.
What were some of the challenges of making Star Fox 2 and programming for the Super FX 2 chip back in the day? Do you remember how you overcame them? Was there anything in particular that would be difficult to do even today?
Compared to Star Fox 1, I rewrote massive parts of the engine to run in parallel in RAM to get more non-contended Super FX chip time for more advanced features such as planar clipping and decent collision detection.
Alpha and beta builds of the game have been leaked over the years. How does the final version differ from the apparently pre-release beta version that some fans have been able to play?
All those ROMs lacked the final magic - i.e. the Mario Club QA and tuning process that makes Nintendo games so good. The final few months of iteration are so important for a game. Also they were set up in debug modes, so the encounter systems didn't seem to work very well.
Screenshots from the beta show a frame-rate counter at around 20fps. Do you recall how the last build of the game ran? Was it optimized beyond that beta while you were still working on it or is the leaked beta build the last version you worked on?
20fps was par for the course back then (it took 3 "v-blank" interrupts to transfer the graphics "safely" to the screen's VRAM). My rewrite of the engine subsequently allowed it to run at 30fps by using some tricks to speed up that transfer, but we locked to 20 for a consistent frame-rate.
As far as you know, what were the reasons behind the cancellation of the game? It is widely considered that Nintendo wanted to avoid going up against the early CD-based 3D games of the era, but is that correct? Were there any technical or contractual issues involved in that decision?
Quite simply put, market conditions - the PlayStation and Saturn had just come out and suddenly our form of 3D felt old and Nintendo had a strong rivalry going with Sony and Sega - I'm pretty sure they didn't want to lose face or be seen as inferior.
How does it feel to know that people will finally get to play this game that you put your heart and soul into so many years ago? Will you be playing it yourself?
It's absolutely awesome - now all we need is for the mastered English version of X for the Game Boy to be dug up out of (legendary Nintendo designer Gunpei) Yokoi's old archives!
Want to see what Dylan Cuthbert is up to these days? Check out our round-up of 18 sweet games we played at BitSummit this year, including his own Eden Obscura.
Daniel Robson is Chief Editor of IGN Japan; you can find him on Twitter @nomoredaniels.
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