Star Fox 2 Almost Had A Black Female Pilot With Incredible Hair, And I. Am. Smitten.

One drip of information in the deluge coming from Nintendo’s latest “Gigaleak” was source code and unused assets for Star Fox 2, including a never-before-seen human character. Completed in 1995, Nintendo shelved the game out of fear it’d look inferior to the next-gen graphics of the PlayStation. (The game was subsequently released as an unlockable title on the SNES Classic in 2017.) But none of that matters to me.

LOOK AT HER!!

@dylancuthbert Whoa, who is this in the bottom left? pic.twitter.com/6aM9JCLm35

— dallowbg (@shelfcompact) July 24, 2020

Her hair, the easy confidence of her smirk. THE HAIR!!

WHO IS SHE??

Even one of the game’s creators, Dylan Cuthbert, doesn’t know.

I don’t even remember, as this is all very early on prototype stuff, we switched around a ton of stuff

— Dylan Makes Games (@dylancuthbert) July 24, 2020

Could we have gotten a Star Fox where humans lived and loved right alongside anthropomorphized falcons, foxes, and barrel-rolling bunnies? (Is it passé to make a barrel roll joke in 2020?) More importantly, could we have had Nintendo’s first Black female character in 1995 instead of waiting for, depending on if a Game Freak game even qualifies, Lenora in Pokémon Black/White some 15 years later? (Am I forgetting anyone? I’d love to be corrected here.)

She could have been the representation that little Black girls playing Nintendo needed back when video games were still “for boys and white folks.”. And she was a pilot. How many more Black aviatrixes could we have had behind her?

I don’t begrudge Nintendo for not including her in the final game — I understand the limitations of game development. I also don’t want to think about what kind of contortions my brain would have to undergo to justify humans in a universe full of upright talking frogs. Though I hope, as more information contained within the leak is brought to life, that we can learn more about her.