The biggest surprise regarding Nintendo’s upcoming release of their SNES Classic system was that it will include Star Fox 2, a game that spent years in development only to ultimately be canceled. So, what happened?

A sequel to the original Star Fox, the game continued the story from its predecessor as the Star Fox crew battles against the return of Andross. The team – Fox McCloud, Falco Lombardi, Peppy Hare, Slippy Toad, plus new recruits Fay and Miyu – fights Andross’ forces in order to protect Corneria and the Lylat System.

Star Fox 2 was originally scheduled to release in summer 1995 and saw heavy coverage in a number of gaming publications in anticipation of that release. A playable version of the game was showcased at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1995 as well, but the game ended up being canned. According to an interview with lead programmer Dylan Cuthbert, the game was canceled due to “the then-impending Nintendo 64, which of course was intended to be released a lot sooner than it actually was. [Shigeru Miyamoto] decided he wanted to have a clean break between 3D games on the Super NES and 3D games on the new, superior 64-bit system. In retrospect, he could have released Star Fox 2 and there would have been over a year and a half before the N64 came out. But hindsight is always 20/20.”

Eventually, an alpha build of the game was leaked as a ROM online; further, more advanced builds of the game were also leaked online. Though originally only available in Japanese, a fan-made patch translated it into English and helped to fix most of the bugs present in the code.

Many ideas originating from the development of Star Fox 2 were carried into future releases; Miyamoto himself estimated that about 30% of Star Fox 64 came out of the development of Star Fox 2. But now that the game is finally – after 22 years – seeing an actual official release, Star Fox fans can finally put those gameplay mechanics and other ideas into perspective.