I am #DrinKING with Star Fox 2 Fellows.@dylancuthbert pic.twitter.com/oak5WyfTq0

— Hidetaka SWERY SueHERO (@Swery65) June 27, 2017

https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/06/star-fox-2-programmer-is-surprised-and-thrilled-the-game-is-finally-coming-out/

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-06-27-dylan-cuthbert-star-fox-2-release-is-a-big-awesome-surprise

Programmer Dylan Cuthbert:

“[I was] Totally weirded out and totally psyched. I mean, I had completely given up on the chance that it might come out. 

I didn't know about it at all. We don't have any work happening with Nintendo right now so there wouldn't have been an NDA-safe way of letting me know anyway. On the other hand, I got to have a big awesome surprise like everyone else so I'm quite happy about that.

I spent two years of hard work making it and loved every minute. Finally people get to see all the little cool tweaks and things, all the touches and special ideas we threw in there. This game had so much experimentation at the start and that really shows in some of the encounters you’ll come across. I hope people don’t think they cleared the game with just one playthrough! In that sense, it is a very unique game."

He also talks about why it was cancelled:

"Nintendo was a little sensitive to the competition with Sega and Sony, [PS1 and Saturn were out by this time] and so made the strategic decision not to give the public a chance to compare."

I still don't buy Nintendo's line of thinking as to why they cancelled a 99% finished game ahead of release. The N64 wouldn't see release for another year, and StarFox was a wildly popular title when it came out for the SNES in '93, so a bonafide sequel just a couple years later would've done very well and further whet gamers' appetites for a 64-bit outing of the franchise.

I mean it's not like Nintendo stopped support of the SNES in '95... they still put out major titles like Earthbound, SMW2, DKC2, and a home port of Killer Instinct that year, and even in '96 you had major titles like SMRPG, Kirby Super Star, Ken Griffey Winning Run and DKC3 alongside the launch of the N64.

I was wondering about Cuthbert's reaction to this, and this is indeed a nice one. Glad their game's finally able to be released after being canceled a long time ago

Starfox 64 didn't "happen" for another 2 years though.  That's like Nintendo saying around the same time "well, we've got Super Mario World 2 roughly 95% in the can and we've already featured screenshots of it in our own magazine... but screw it, let's cancel that too because we've got Super Mario 64 coming in less than a year, and we're planning on giving Yoshi his own game anyway with Yoshi's Story!

How many different reboots has the Star Fox franchise had?

I'm looking forward to the snes mini getting hacked and the starfox 2 rom dumped so people can compare it to the final beta released by one of the developers.

Still doesn't make much sense from a business perspective because a year earlier Nintendo was beating its chest with the release of the first Donkey Kong Country and a famously aggressive ad campaign that took SEGA and other rivals head on with its "you don't need expensive new hardware to enjoy this amazing game!" messaging.  This helped catapult Nintendo ahead of SEGA for good, and there was no reason to drop that type of advertising in the wake of the release of the Saturn which had gotten off to a terrible start thanks in part to its premature launch.

Nintendo should have simply released the game in spring / summer of '95 like originally planned with an ad campaign along the lines of "you don't need a $400 machine to play this amazing game!".  The game would've been a hit and kept the momentum going for Nintendo into the fall when they released heavy hitters SMW2 and DKC2 to combat Sony's launch of the PS1.

I think they wanted the Super FX chip axed in general because they wanted to shift focus to the N64 for 3D graphics. 

I remember looking at game magazines back then and Nintendo was supposed to publish a bunch of SNES Super FX games as I recall. Star Fox 2 was one, but FX Fighter and Comanche for SNES were also supposed to be Nintendo published games that used the Super FX chip as I recall, but Nintendo backed out of those deals too. 

Surely that expensive SFX2 risc chip has to be a factor, it was much more advanced than the dsp they had in some cartridges and an improvement on the SFX chip.

It's got to be expensive to make cartridges with that in, for Star Fox I think they wanted to show the super nintendo as competitive for 3D games but at the end of the super nintendo era with a new console coming taking a loss or minimal profit on the game may not have been so logical. Yes its a complete game but also it would have been very expensive to manufacture.

I guess with this classic console version featuring Yoshi's Island they have SFX2 emulation anyway so Star Fox 2 was an easy addition.

I'm a big Starfox fan and looking forward to playing this game. I dabbled with it on emulation but playing it with the right controller and possibly a later build of the game appeals a lot more. I just hope the emulation quality does it justice.

I always found it disappointing that this game was cancelled, so it's nice that these guys finally get to have their hard work pay off, even if its 22 years late.