Star Fox (1993) hid a GPU in a game cartridge before GPUs existed — now it’s back

Before the PlayStation. Before NVIDIA. Before “GPU” was a word most people knew, a small team of British programmers and Nintendo engineers packed a 3D graphics accelerator into a game cartridge and told the SNES to draw polygon spaceships. Fox McCloud’s Arwing banked into frame in early 1993, and video game hardware was never quite the same.

The Super FX chip is the device that made Star Fox possible. Printed on the chip itself was the codename “MARIO” — Mathematical Argonaut Rotation I/O — a nod to both Argonaut Software, the British studio that designed it, and to the company that would publish the game. It ran at 10.74 MHz, approximately 40 times faster than the SNES could process 3D graphics on its own. What it did inside that cartridge — translating mathematical coordinates into flat-shaded polygons at 15,000 to 20,000 per second — had simply not been done on a consumer game system before.

The chip came out of an unlikely partnership. Jez San, founder of Argonaut Software, had built 3D demos on Game Boy hardware without official Nintendo development kits. When Nintendo’s producers saw what the British team was doing, Shigeru Miyamoto had a direct request: he wanted to render a plane in polygons. San hired Cambridge University chip designers and Argonaut’s lead programmer Dylan Cuthbert moved to Kyoto for what was supposed to be four weeks and stayed until the game shipped. Nintendo’s design team added the characters that transformed a tech demonstration into a world: Fox McCloud, Falco Lombardi, Peppy Hare, Slippy Toad, and the villain Andross. By the time they arrived, even Argonaut was surprised by what the game had become.

What Star Fox offers a player is a rail shooter — the Arwing moves on a fixed path through the Lylat system, and the objective is to destroy enemies, protect teammates, and defeat bosses across stages that end at Venom, Andross’s stronghold. Three difficulty routes branch the experience: a shorter, more forgiving path for newcomers; a middle route with more enemies; and a seven-stage expert path for experienced players. Computer-controlled wingmen communicate throughout — offering situational advice and occasionally calling for help when enemies get behind them. The game was a technical demonstration. It also had people worth caring about.

It sold over four million copies by 1998, making it the fastest-selling game launch in North America at the time. Electronic Gaming Monthly named it Best Shooter of 1993. Every major publication of the era put scores in the 90s. Star Fox did what a new piece of technology always needs: it found software capable of explaining what the hardware was for.

Playing it in 2026 takes some adjustment. The frame rate drops during busy sequences; the polygons are angular where modern hardware would render them smooth; the fixed flight path keeps the player on rails when later entries would offer more freedom. Star Fox 64, the 1997 sequel, expanded the concept significantly — more stages, more secrets, fuller voice work — and most players who came to the series through that game will find the original a leaner proposition. What it lacks in depth it compensates with genuine forward momentum. The branching routes and a handful of hidden paths give the campaign more replayability than its stage count suggests.

The original Star Fox is available on Nintendo Switch Online as part of the SNES library at no additional cost to subscribers. A new entry in the franchise, a remake of Star Fox 64 developed by Velan Studios for the Nintendo Switch 2, arrived on June 25, 2026 — the first Star Fox game in nearly a decade. The remake earned an 81 on Metacritic, praised for its fidelity to the source material and its updated presentation. To understand why it matters that Nintendo returned to the Lylat system, it helps to go back to the game that decided polygon spacecraft were worth building.

Tags: nintendo, Argonaut Software, retro gaming, SNES, Star Fox, Super FX chip