The Star Fox 2 team is so pumped to see the game come out

Star Fox 2’s upcoming release after more than 20 years in the cancellation pile is a huge deal, especially for the team that worked on it. Dylan Cuthbert, a former Argonaut Software developer who now heads up Q-Games, has spent the week celebrating the project’s rebirth with fellow members of the Argonaut and Nintendo teams who worked on it.

Cuthbert tweeted several pictures yesterday of key members of the Star Fox 2 staff, including designer Takaya Imamura. Kazushi Maeta and Jordan Amaro, designers on various other Star Fox and Nintendo projects, also joined the group, as did veteran designer Hidetaka “Swery” Suehiro.

The excitement is palpable from Cuthbert’s pictures and tweets. His entire timeline for the last several days has been incredulity that, yes, Star Fox 2 will be officially playable by all later this year. The SNES Classic Edition exclusively includes the game, which Nintendo axed in the mid-1990s right before work was complete.

“I’m still kind of in a reality distortion field — Star Fox 2 is really coming out?” Cuthbert wrote.

“It’s going to be surreal playing it,” he told another Twitter user, because “it’s so long ago [that] it will feel so fresh.”

If it’s surreal for its original developers, it may be even more so for big Nintendo fans. Star Fox 2 was one of those storied Nintendo projects that seemed destined for legend, even though ROMs of early builds have been widely available for years. For Star Fox lovers, though, an official release seemed impossible.

The SNES Classic Edition will see a full build finally out in the wild. It’s out stateside on Sept. 29, with the original Star Fox also included for the complete SNES Star Fox collection. Based on Twitter, Cuthbert plans to do a let’s play and walkthrough for the game, so keep an eye out for that this fall.