I want to tell you about April 2026. It was the month when many Nintendo fans were expecting a Star Fox announcement. It was also the month we found out what happened to the StarFox puppets.

Those two things are connected. Sort of. Not really. But they both happened in April, within twenty-four hours of each other, and together they form one of the most perfectly tragic little stories the Nintendo fandom has produced in years.

This is that story.

The hope

StarFox has been dormant for a long time. The last mainline entry — StarFox Zero on the Wii U — came out in 2016. It wasn’t bad, exactly. It was complicated. The dual-screen controls were divisive, the GamePad felt gimmicky, and it landed without the cultural impact the series deserved.

And then: nothing. For nearly a decade, Fox McCloud sat in the hangar. The Great Fox is gathering dust. StarFox appeared in Smash, in the occasional Nintendo crossover, and nowhere else.

Then, earlier this year, a leaker named NateTheHate changed all of that.

If you’re not familiar, Nate Drake has one of the better track records in Nintendo leaking. He’s not a guy who throws things at the wall. When he commits to something, people pay attention.

And what he committed to was this: a new Star Fox game is coming to the Nintendo Switch 2. Arriving June 2026. A multiplayer experience — a spinoff of sorts — with a proper mainline entry reportedly to follow in 2027.

And he wasn’t alone. VGC backed the story. A French insider corroborated the details. This wasn’t one anonymous source whispering into the void. Multiple credible people were saying the same thing.
The fandom woke up. After years of nothing, StarFox was coming back.

The countdown

April was the month. Nate had said so specifically.

The announcement would come via Nintendo Today — Nintendo’s relatively new iOS and Android app — or via their official X account. Not a big Direct. Not a scheduled showcase. A quiet drop. A notification on your phone.

People started watching. Refreshing. Waiting.

Days passed. Nothing.

Then, on April 26th — with four days left on the calendar — someone on ResetEra pushed Nate. Are you still confident? Is this actually happening this month?

His response was remarkable in its certainty.

“I have zero doubt in the StarFox project — hell, VGC and a French journalist have also spoken about the game and back the info of it coming in June. If it doesn’t get revealed this month as planned, it simply means Nintendo made a marketing pivot and adjusted the timeline a touch.”

He’d already gone on record elsewhere: “I said StarFox will be announced this month via Nintendo Today or Twitter.”

Specific. Confident. On record. Four days left.

The hard right turn

April 27th. One day after “zero doubt.”

The StarFox community got some news.

Not the announcement they wanted. Not an Arwing flying across a Switch 2 loading screen. Not a logo reveal on Nintendo Today.

Instead, Time Extension — a video game history publication — had been doing some digging. They wanted to answer a question that had quietly lingered for thirty years: what actually happened to the original StarFox puppets?

Because here’s the thing. When Nintendo released the very first StarFox on the SNES, they commissioned a Japanese FX company called Shirogumi to create a set of physical puppets — Fox McCloud, Falco Lombardi, Peppy Hare, and Slippy Toad. These weren’t toys. They were professional production pieces — fur, feathers, carefully crafted. They appeared in the box art. Print ads. In-store promotions. The strategy guide.

And then they just… disappeared. Nobody knew what had happened to them. Until now.

Time Extension reached out to programmer Dylan Cuthbert and artist Takaya Imamura. Neither could give a definitive answer. So they went to Shirogumi directly.

The response they received:

“The Fox puppets created at our company were made by gluing fur and feathers to natural rubber, so they deteriorate simply by being exposed to air. Because of that, we had to destroy them after production was finished.”

The puppets were destroyed. By air. They were killed by the act of existing in the world.

April 26th: NateTheHate, zero doubt, StarFox is coming, the announcement is imminent.
April 27th: The StarFox puppets are dead. They have always been dead. They died because rubber deteriorates.

No announcement. But we did get that.

Nintendo actually revisited the puppets concept for StarFox Zero — dolls for Fox, Falco, and Peppy were part of the game’s original reveal, appearing in a segment with Satoru Iwata, Shigeru Miyamoto, and Reggie Fils-Aime. The last time the puppets meant something joyful. Now we know that the originals were gone long before any of that.

The anticlimactic end

April 30th. The month ends.

Nintendo Today pushes a notification. It is not about StarFox.

Nintendo’s X account posts. It is not about StarFox.

There is no StarFox announcement.

NateTheHate posts a statement:

“As said several days ago: I do not doubt the game’s existence. Several outlets/people have spoken on the game beyond me, as well. Timing for reveal was off the mark and wrong. That’s a miss by me.”

Gracious. Measured. Honest. He owns it clearly and cleanly.

But consider the arc of those five days. April 26th: zero doubt. May 1st: that’s a miss by me.

The scoreboard for April 2026 — StarFox game announcements: zero. StarFox puppet death confirmations: one.

The biggest StarFox news of the month was that the puppets no longer exist, and in fact never really could have existed beyond a brief window in 1993 before the air got to them.

The silver lining

The game almost certainly exists.

Nate isn’t walking back the game — only the timing. VGC hasn’t corrected their reporting. The French insider hasn’t gone quiet. Multiple credible sources don’t all independently fabricate the same multiplayer StarFox spinoff.

The explanation Nate himself offered is plausible: Nintendo made a marketing pivot. The game is still in June. The reveal window just shifted. A June Nintendo Direct — the kind Nintendo typically uses for summer lineup reveals — would be the logical home for it now. That’s where you announce a game launching that same month.

Cautious hope. The Arwing is still out there somewhere. We just can’t see it yet.

But we’ve been here before. Don’t refresh your phone. It’ll come when it comes.

Has Nintendo’s marketing changed?

There’s something worth sitting with here beyond the comedy of the timing.

Nate’s original prediction was interesting not just for what it said, but for how he said it. The announcement, he specified, would come via Nintendo Today or X. Not a Direct. Not a scheduled presentation. A tweet. An app notification.

That’s a different thing.

Nintendo Directs are a ritual. They’re an event. Fans schedule time around them. Communities watch together, react together, clip the same moments simultaneously. There’s a shared experience baked into the format that a phone notification fundamentally cannot replicate.

And there are signs Nintendo has been experimenting with moving away from that. The Nintendo Today app is a relatively new infrastructure — designed for drip-fed content, small announcements, a more constant low-level hum of news rather than periodic big moments.

If the StarFox reveal was genuinely planned as a Nintendo Today post and was genuinely delayed by a marketing decision, that tells you something about how Nintendo is thinking about announcements now. Not every game gets a Direct slot. Some things just appear.

This creates a strange situation for leakers, too. The traditional model — “here’s the Direct lineup” — assumes Nintendo is building toward a centralised moment. If they’re not, if announcements can happen any time on any platform, then knowing a game exists tells you much less than it used to. You can have zero doubt and still have no idea when or how something surfaces.

We may be in a different era of Nintendo news. April 2026 might be a small illustration of that.

The biggest Nintendo news is no news.

We went into April 2026 with raised expectations. A reliable leaker, corroborated by credible outlets, had promised a StarFox announcement. People were watching Nintendo Today. Watching X. Ready.

We ended April with no announcement, a leaker admitting a timing miss, and the knowledge — fresh, newly confirmed — that the original StarFox puppets were destroyed shortly after they were made, because they were made of rubber, and rubber doesn’t survive the air.

The game is still coming. Probably in June. The puppets are not.

And in the absence of actual StarFox news, the StarFox community spent most of April talking about StarFox anyway. The leaks generated coverage. The miss generated coverage. The puppets generated coverage. Nintendo said nothing — and somehow, StarFox was everywhere.

That’s the thing about a franchise people love: it’s a franchise. You don’t actually need Nintendo to do anything. The conversation fills itself in.

The biggest Nintendo news this week is that there is none.