Like the original game being renamed Starwing in Europe, Star Fox 64 was renamed Lylat Wars for the European release due to a copyright dispute.
Star Fox 64 was technically the second game in the series. Star Fox 2 was fully developed for the Super Nintendo but was canceled due to the high cost of cartridge production and looking outdated compared to PlayStation and Sega Saturn titles.
Star Fox 64 was the first Nintendo 64 game to use the Rumble Pak, which was sometimes bundled with the game. The development team struggled to justify the peripheral at first, as playtesters were confused about why their controller was rumbling.
Nintendo had a lot of faith in the success of Star Fox 64, spending approximately $7 million on advertising alone.
Shigeru Miyamoto wasn’t completely satisfied with the final version of Star Fox 64, but he did feel that it made better use of the Nintendo 64’s processing power than Super Mario 64.
The saucer battle on Katina was inspired by the American film Independence Day.
A lot of the artwork in the game depicts Fox McCloud holding a small pistol, which he never uses in Star Fox 64. However, the weapon later became available for him to use in the Super Smash Bros. series.
The famous “barrel roll” in Star Fox 64 is actually an aileron roll, not a true barrel roll.
Star Fox 64 is one of the first Nintendo games to feature voice acting—especially with the extensive amount of dialogue it includes.
A 2020 Nintendo data leak revealed an image suggesting that Star Fox 64 was once going to have the subtitle The Cosmic Crisis.
In the English version of Star Fox 64, Falco Lombardi says, “Hey Einstein, I’m on your side!”—a line that stirred controversy for implying Albert Einstein exists in the Star Fox universe. In the Japanese version, the line is closer to, “Damn it! Can’t you tell friend from foe?”
Nintendo initially intended for the Arwing to have green Hyper Lasers, but these more powerful beams were ultimately removed from the final game.
Star Fox (SNES) and the canceled Star Fox 2 implied that the planet Venom was once green and lush. However, Star Fox 64 retcons this, stating that it was always desolate, which is why Andross was exiled there. The game is considered a soft reboot rather than a direct sequel.
One of the villains, Pigma, speaks in a Kansai dialect in the Japanese version. His speech, personality, and design are stereotypical caricatures of people from that region, which Kansai natives find offensive.
The character ROB 64 was an obvious nod to the NES peripheral R.O.B., but it was intended more as a joke than a sincere homage.
Some fans speculated that the frog Slippy was female, but Nintendo officially confirmed the amphibian pilot is male.
The Star Wolf team originally included a snake pilot named Saruto, but he was cut from the final release.
According to official Nintendo lore, Andross dies for real in the finale of Star Fox 64, and all later appearances are either clones or artificial intelligence versions of him.