From Vicarious Visions to Star Fox: The 30-Year Story of Velan Studios

When Nintendo revealed a surprise Star Fox 64 remake for Switch 2, they did something entirely typical — they showed the game, announced a release date, and even dropped a free demo on the eShop. All the while saying absolutely nothing about who actually made it.

This is something of a standard practice for Nintendo though, as for some reason, they’re famously tight-lipped about crediting their various development studio partners. For example, the teams behind Princess Peach: Showtime, Mario & Luigi: Brothership, and even the Switch 2’s own Welcome Tour weren’t publicly known until after launch. It looked like Star Fox was going to be no different.

For the best part of a month after the game’s reveal, the internet speculated wildly as to who was behind Fox McCloud’s dramatic return, before the studio from upstate New York decided to tell us themselves. That studio is Velan Studios.

A scrappy indie with a long history

They describe themselves (on their YouTube page at least) as “a scrappy indie video game studio” — which, for some, might explain why the name doesn’t immediately ring any bells. However, the people actually behind Velan Studios have been in this industry for a very long time, with a shared history spanning over thirty years.

Not only that, but they’ve actually worked with Nintendo before they were given the keys to the Lylat System.

The Vicarious Visions years

See Velan Studios’ roots go back to 1991. As it was then when two brothers, namely Guha Bala and Karthik Bala, founded a development studio while they were still in high school. They called it Vicarious Visions, a name you’ll almost certainly recognise if you owned a Game Boy Advance back in the early 2000s.

They became a prolific studio during that early 2000s period, porting major titles to the GBA. These included ambitious ports of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Crash Bandicoot, SpongeBob, and much more. They also worked on Marvel titles, Shrek games, a Bond game for the DS, Guitar Hero ports, and Skylanders titles over the years. They clearly built a solid reputation during this time as gaming giant Activision eventually came knocking.

As a result, Vicarious Visions became a subsidiary of the company, and was eventually fully absorbed into Blizzard. The Bala brothers left the company they created in April 2016, and by November of that same year had founded Velan Studios — starting over from scratch.

Their first Nintendo collaboration

A few years after starting Velan Studios the company worked with Nintendo for the first time. It was 2020, and the result of this new relationship was Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit — a bold augmented reality experiment in which a real RC car, equipped with a camera, could race around tracks built on your living room floor. It was a genuinely clever take on the Mario Kart franchise, perfectly timed for stay-at-home pandemic races. I will note though that its appeal was a limited somewhat by the amount of floor space required – my house has nowhere near the floor space shown in the awesome debut trailer.

Anyway, the result was a neat Mario Kart spin-off with a real, tangible toy element — something that’s very Nintendo. Velan Studios handled a precious Nintendo property with plenty of care and attention, and that’s what mattered.

After working on Mario Kart, Velan Studios next major release was Knockout City, a competitive dodgeball game published by EA. It was inventive, well-liked, and seemed to have a devoted (but maybe too small) player base. EA shut it down two years later.

After that setback, Velan kept busy, releasing Hot Wheels Rift Rally, Bounce Arcade, and horror party game Midnight Murder Club. All the while, they were quietly working on what would become, I imagine, their biggest project to date.

The Star Fox reveal

When Nintendo showed this new Star Fox at a surprise Direct presentation in May 2026, the community immediately started asking the obvious question of who made this?

The style, the feel, and the technical presentation all suggested that it was the effort of an external studio, rather than an internal Nintendo project. The speculation pointed to Bandai-Namco as popular pick — given their history with Star Fox: Assault and the Ace Combat pedigree. Q-Games also got mentions, having made Star Fox Command and the 3DS remake of Star Fox 64. Next Level Games was another name floated. But nobody seemed to guess Velan Studios.

A month later, the mystery was solved as Velan Studios confirmed the news themselves on their social media, updating their website at the same time. Karthik Bala, CEO at Velan, wrote: “I’m so incredibly proud of the team at Velan Studios and our partnership with Nintendo.” The studio described Star Fox as a project they had “poured our hearts and souls into.“

The technical achievement

Another interesting wrinkle in all of this is the fact that Star Fox for the Nintendo Switch 2 runs on VIPER. This is Velan’s own in-house engine, built from the ground up. The result is a game that runs at a solid 60fps, with lovely cinematics rendered in real-time. It’s little wonder this has been called one of the best-looking Nintendo games ever made.

A 30-year story

So there you have it, Velan Studios are an indie studio from upstate New York, run by two brothers who got their start making games in 1991 — two years before the original Star Fox even existed. Now, with a team of around 75, they’re the ones who were trusted to bring it back, introducing a flagship Nintendo franchise to an entirely new generation. The results seem very positive.

I thought it was nice they got to tell the world for themselves.