On Wednesday evening, Nintendo did something it almost never does. With roughly ten minutes of warning posted to the Nintendo Today! app, the company shadow-dropped a fifteen-minute Direct dedicated entirely to one game: Star Fox. Not a new Star Fox, but a remake of Star Fox 64 — the 1997 Nintendo 64 classic that defined a generation of couch co-op gaming. Coming to Switch 2 on June 25, the announcement sent the internet into a frenzy.
To some, the drop may seem out of nowhere. But if you've been paying attention to 2026, Star Fox's return shouldn't surprise you at all. Because somehow, quietly, without anyone formally declaring it, the 90s are back — and they're back harder than at any point since the decade actually ended.
Wonderwall Is Playing Everywhere Again
Oasis, the band that defined the 1990s, spent 2025 on one of the biggest reunion tours in history. The Oasis Live '25 Tour kicked off on July 4 in Cardiff and ran through November in São Paulo, grossing over $405 million and selling out stadiums across 14 countries. In 2009, Liam and Noel Gallagher split backstage at a French festival and spent nearly a decade apart. In 2025, they were back, and the world couldn't get enough.
The numbers tell the story. Oasis has accumulated 12 billion total Spotify streams. "Wonderwall" alone sits well over a billion. When the reunion was announced in August 2024, their daily US streams nearly quadrupled overnight. A new generation that had discovered them through TikTok and Spotify algorithms was suddenly buying tickets to stand in stadiums and sing back every word to songs their parents grew up with. The reunion was described by one outlet as "the most controversial band comeback since the Sex Pistols' 1996 Filthy Lucre Tour," and it still sold out Wembley five times.
This wasn't nostalgia as a side dish. It was the main course.
The One Where Everyone Watched It Again
Television has its own version of the same story. Friends, which aired from 1994 to 2004 and was considered a relic of a bygone era, has somehow become one of the most-watched shows on the planet in 2026. It has never left the top ten on streaming. Younger viewers who weren't alive when it aired are discovering it for the first time and treating it like a new release. The Central Perk aesthetic is on TikTok. The “Ross and Rachel” discourse never really ended.
It isn't alone. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which premiered in March 1997, had a full Hulu revival in active production as recently as this year, with Sarah Michelle Gellar returning as Buffy and Oscar-winning Nomadland director Chloé Zhao attached to direct the pilot. The project was ultimately canceled in March 2026 — but the fact that a major streaming platform committed serious resources to reviving a show from 1997 says everything. Even the failed attempt at a 90s revival is a 90s revival story.
Low-Rise Jeans and Butterfly Clips
For anyone willing to listen, fashion has been yelling about it. Y2K and 90s aesthetics have dominated runways, TikTok feeds, and high streets for the better part of two years — and in 2026, they show no signs of slowing down. Low-rise jeans, the trend that every fashion editor swore would stay a fad, are back. Alexander McQueen's Spring/Summer 2026 runway featured low-slung denim, revealing the dangerously low-rise silhouette that defined the era. Dior's Spring/Summer 2026 runway followed suit.
Butterfly clips are back as well. Juicy Couture, the brand synonymous with Paris Hilton and velour tracksuits, reissued their iconic pieces to a new generation of buyers. Baby Phat reintroduced their signature mini skirts. Levi's reported an 89% sales spike, driven by nostalgia-led campaigns that lean into vintage-inspired collections.
A 2025 study by The Drum found that 75% of consumers are more likely to engage with brands that evoke nostalgia. The fashion industry heard that and ran with it. What was once dismissed as tacky, era-specific kitsch has been reassessed as iconic. The 20-year cycle theory of fashion holds that trends return when enough time has passed that they feel fresh rather than recent. By that logic, the late 90s were always going to come back around 2025 or 2026. They arrived right on schedule.
Do a Barrel Roll
Nintendo's announcement this week wasn't made in a vacuum. It arrived in a cultural moment already saturated with 90s nostalgia — Oasis is selling out stadiums, Friends is trending on streaming, and low-rise jeans are in every clothing store window. Into that moment of nostalgia, Nintendo dropped a remake of a game from 1997, announced it with ten minutes' notice, and watched it explode within hours.
Star Fox 64 was never a household name. It doesn't have the cultural ubiquity of Mario or Zelda. But it has something arguably more powerful right now: it is a specific, crystalline memory of a specific era. The Arwing. "Do a barrel roll." Peppy, Slippy, Falco, and Fox McCloud. For a certain generation, playing Star Fox 64 on a Nintendo 64 is one of the clearest sensory memories they have — the feeling of a cartridge sliding into a console, four controllers plugged in, the low hum of a CRT television. Nintendo isn't just selling a remake. It's selling a time machine.
And in 2026, that's apparently exactly what everyone wants.
The 90s never really went away. They just waited. They waited for the generation that grew up in them to get old enough to be nostalgic, young enough to still care, and financially stable enough to buy the tickets, stream the albums, and pre-order the games. That generation is here now. Oasis knew it. Fashion knew it. Netflix and Hulu knew it, even if Hulu blinked on Buffy.
Evidently, so does Nintendo.