So this is what Star Fox man Giles Goddard has been up to: making a game that looks just like Star Fox. It’s even got a team of anthropomorphic animals flying the spaceship-fighter-planes. It’s even got those boxy aiming windows. It’s even got the same bright-skied vibe. There’s no denying what Wild Blue’s inspiration was, and I’m A-OK with that.
We got our first look at Wild Blue’s gameplay yesterday in the Future Game Show, in a trailer that mixed comedic anime sections – presumably the game’s cutscenes – with actual footage of the aerial dogfighting game in action. We saw the little red and white spaceship-fighter-planes boost around cloudy levels and caves together, while barrel-rolling around lava-filled obstacles and laser-firing at enemy craft, then thanking each other for the assist in pop-up dialogue windows after. Sound familiar?
Even the trailer blurb underlines the game’s inspiration: “Wild Blue reimagines the classic on-rail adventures of the ’90s. Join Bowie Stray and the Blue Bombers as they soar through the skies on a mission to save the world in this action-packed, nostalgic journey!”
Curiously though, given the inspiration and the studio’s Nintendo heritage, Wild Blue is only in development for PC and Xbox Series X/S. It also doesn’t have a release date. These are things I’m following up on with the studio so I’ll let you know more if and when I do.
Wild Blue is the project Giles Goddard was teasing when I spoke to him back in 2019, about his time making the original Star Fox, and other games, at Nintendo in the 1990s. It’s a wonderful story (if I don’t say so myself) of two Westerners who found themselves lifted from the scruffy, home-based office of Argonaut in the UK, to Nintendo’s secretive and regimented HQ in Japan. Goddard would stay there for a number of years, working on projects like 1080 Snowboarding and the iconic pullable Mario face in Mario 64.
His tenure saw him work regularly with legendary Nintendo figures like Shigeru Miyamoto and Satoru Iwata, who he went on an American away-trip with, while the company researched the chip it would use for the N64 console. Goddard played an important role there, then, and the time he spent there rubbed off on him enormously, particularly the company’s famously high standards.
Goddard left Nintendo to make his own studio but worked with the Mario-maker as a second-party studio for years to come. It was only relatively recently his company rebranded to Chuhai Labs and stepped out of the Nintendo shadow, making games of its own, albeit those with a heavy Nintendo bent, such as Carve Snowboarding, an obvious successor to 1080 Snowboarding, and now of course Wild Blue.
“If you like Star Fox then you’ll like this,” Goddard told me back then, when he couldn’t say what the game was, and I remember the face I pulled as it dawned on me what he was saying. He must have noticed this because he quickly added: “It’s not a Star Fox game. But if you like Star Fox, I think you’ll like this.”
I think I will. I can’t wait.
