Nintendo / Argonaut Software · Super Nintendo Entertainment System · 1995 · Completed — Unreleased Until 2017
Star Fox 2 was a complete, fully playable sequel to Star Fox for the SNES that Nintendo finished and then shelved in 1995 to avoid undermining the N64's launch, remaining unreleased for 22 years before appearing on the SNES Classic Mini.
Star Fox 2 was in full production from 1993 and reached a state of complete, bug-tested readiness by mid-1995. Developed by Nintendo R&D3 in collaboration with Argonaut Software — the team behind the original Star Fox and the Super FX chip — the sequel was more ambitious than its predecessor in nearly every respect. It featured real-time simultaneous combat across the Lylat System's map screen rather than the original's linear stage progression, introduced characters Miyu and Fay (a lynx and a poodle) who would have been the franchise's first playable female characters, and used an updated Super FX2 chip to render significantly more complex polygonal geometry than the original game had managed. The dynamic structure — players could intercept missiles heading toward Corneria while simultaneously managing multiple team members on different routes — would have represented a considerable design leap for the series. Nintendo cancelled the release in 1995 for reasons that had nothing to do with the game's quality. Nintendo of America's Minoru Arakawa was concerned that releasing a SNES game using polygon graphics would undermine anticipation for the N64, which was being developed simultaneously and whose marquee technical feature was 3D polygon rendering. If SNES owners could already play a technically impressive polygon game, the argument went, the generational leap to N64 hardware would seem less dramatic. The decision was commercially rational but historically unfortunate — Star Fox 2 was the most technically sophisticated SNES game ever completed and would have reshaped the franchise's perceived capabilities. The game was not entirely suppressed. Nintendo employees and reviewers who had attended preview sessions retained memories of it, and the game's existence was public knowledge throughout the late 1990s. In 2002, a ROM of the game leaked onto the internet — the result of a former Nintendo employee allegedly removing a copy — and the emulation community was able to confirm that the game was genuinely complete and playable, not merely a half-finished prototype. The ROM circulated widely, and fan translations into multiple languages followed. Nintendo never officially acknowledged the ROM's existence but did not pursue legal action against the numerous websites hosting it. The official release came in 2017, when Nintendo included Star Fox 2 as one of the 21 games on the SNES Classic Mini alongside Star Fox. The inclusion required players to complete the first level of Star Fox before the second game unlocked — a design decision interpreted as a nod to the original release context in which Star Fox 2 was meant to follow the original. The release was accompanied by Argonaut co-founder Dylan Cuthbert's public comments confirming the game's full-completion status in 1995 and expressing satisfaction that it had finally been officially released. The 22-year gap between completion and release makes Star Fox 2 the most significant commercially unreleased completed game in Nintendo's history.