Star Fox, known as Starwing in Europe, is a rail shooter developed and published by Nintendo, released for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1993. It was one of the first SNES games to use the Super FX chip, a coprocessor built into the cartridge that allowed the system to render polygon-based 3D graphics at a time when that was well outside what the base hardware could manage.
Players control Fox McCloud, a mercenary pilot flying an Arwing spacecraft through a series of rail-based corridors and open-range sections. The objective is to reach and defeat the enemy Andross at the end of a series of missions across the Lylat planetary system. The game offers branching route selection that determines difficulty and the number of missions played before the final confrontation. A second player can plug in a second controller to control a wing-mounted laser, though the core experience is single-player.
The game was developed in collaboration with Argonaut Software, a British studio that had been working with Nintendo on Super FX technology. Argonaut's Dylan Cuthbert was a central figure in the technical development, and the Super FX chip itself grew out of research the two companies had been doing together since the late 1980s.
Star Fox was followed by Star Fox 64 in 1997 for the Nintendo 64, which expanded the concept considerably and became the better-known entry for most players who encountered the series. The original SNES game remained region-locked and relatively harder to access for years, contributing to Star Fox 64's stronger foothold in the collective memory. The franchise continued across multiple Nintendo platforms through the 2010s with varying results. A Switch 2 demo surfaced in 2025.
