Long time Pure Nintendo readers may have noticed I have called for a new Star Fox game for a trillion years. For the last three of those years I have wondered why the game was never released. Today, I found out why I was disappointed year after year.

EW: Can you talk about what it’s been like bringing Star Fox to the Wii U? 

SM: We worked on some ideas around Star Fox back during the Wii days. But the problem was that we didn’t have any new ideas to bring to the game. I wasn’t particularly interested in just making another Star Fox game with better graphics and better sound. So we set that aside back then. This time, as we were doing our experiments, and we found this idea of doing the two-screen gameplay. I was particularly interested in a new style of play, where you’d have the cockpit view on one screen, and you’d have the third-person standard Star Fox view on the TV screen, and how those two screens could interact with one another. 

The idea of having a helicopter-style game, and being to then to drop a robot down and tether it, and operate the robot that you dropped while you’re controlling the helicopter: [There are] a lot of new and different ideas that we simply couldn’t have had, if we didn’t have that Wii U Gamepad. 

EW: Is Project Guard something that will grow into its own game, or do you see it being absorbed into a larger game? 

SM: Perhaps if you noticed in Project Guard, there was a Star Fox logo on the cameras! I have different ideas for what would be possible, but I haven’t finalized anything yet. One idea that I had for Star Fox is something like the Thunderbirds TV series, where they had all these different vehicles and Mechs that they could use. I’m not certain, but one thing I think about Star Fox is that, instead of just a ship-based adventure that we’ve seen in previous Star Fox games, there’s multiple different mechs and vehicles and things that they use. And maybe, within that, the Project Guard style of gameplay could be one element of sort of a larger-scaled thing.

The other analogy I’ve been using with the team is that the Star Fox games that we used to make were Star Fox for the movie theater, a big dramatic adventure. And this time, with our focus, it’s a little bit more of Star Fox if it were a TV series. So maybe Project Guard is the TV series of Star Fox that runs late at night, and the main missions of Star Fox are the TV series that runs in primetime. 

EW: Out of interest, who is your favorite character to play in Smash Brothers?

SM: I haven’t played Smash Brothers thoroughly yet, but my suspicion is that I would probably play as Star Fox. Playing as Kirby might be a little bit easier, but… 

EW: You prefer a challenge. 

SM: This is gonna be the year of Star Fox. I’ll play as Star Fox for awhile.

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