Starwing Challenge Day

As the first Super FX-powered game, Starwing was heavily marketed as a landmark in console gaming, and one major part of its promotion was the Starwing Challenge, which is featured in the article below.

Note the rather more obvious use of US Star Fox screenshots in the article, as evidenced by the purple controller buttons in one of the screenshots.

The article also briefly mentions the Teletext information service, which was widely used on TV sets until the change from analogue TV signals to digital during the 2000s. While it was common for broadcasters to feature video game news and reviews on their teletext pages, having its own dedicated page on ITV's Teletext was a real coup for Starwing and Nintendo.

About the Event

The Starwing Challenge was essentially the regional equivalent of the US's Super Star Fox Weekend; visitors to the competition locations throughout the UK could play a specially-adapted version of the game for the chance to win various prizes.

In this version of Starwing, players were given four minutes to complete shortened versions of the Corneria and Asteroid Belt stages followed by a unique space stage which looped until the timer ran out. After the 'Time Up' screen, the player's final score would be displayed.

Unlike the normal game, the score was shown on the screen during gameplay, allowing players a quick glimpse at how well (or how badly!) they were doing. Regardless of their performance, all entrants received a certificate commemorating their score. The highest-scoring players at each location won a Starwing baseball cap and the overall winner won a holiday to the US.

Other European countries also ran the Starwing Challenge, with their own set-ups and prizes.

Merchandise related to the Starwing Challenge, such as cartridges and posters, have since become highly sought-after by collectors; if you want to own such a piece of gaming history, you're going to need deep pockets.

About Teletext and the Starwing Promotion

Teletext was an early type of interactive information service that was broadcast on TV sets alongside the usual television signals, allowing viewers to access round-the-clock news and information long before the creation of the World Wide Web. Each channel had its own teletext service, with the most well-known being the ones run by the main channels: Ceefax (BBC), Oracle (ITV/Channel 4 1974-1992) and Teletext (ITV/Channel 4 1992 onwards). After its heyday in the '80s and '90s, teletext was slowly phased out as television signals switched from analogue to digital and the Internet rose in mainstream use.

For Starwing's release, the game was given its own dedicated advertisement campaign on page 377 on ITV's Teletext, providing news on the Starwing Challenge, as well as general information and tips on Starwing, itself. Although the Club Nintendo article claims that the promotion would run until the end of June 1993, recovered teletext pages from July that year reveal that it ran beyond that date. (Teletext recovery is a process in which teletext data signals that were recorded on VHS tapes when recording TV programmes are isolated and decoded using specialist tools and software.)

At the time of writing, there are no recovered pages relating specifically to the Starwing Challenge, only some of the standard Starwing promotional pages.

A selection of recovered Teletext pages depicting the Starwing promotion are viewable at The Teletext Archive (use the up and down buttons on the site to navigate through the subpages):

3rd June 1993 | 10th June 1993 | 13th July 1993

Picture credits: Starwing Challenge screenshots - Grey Fox (Youtube); the Teletext screenshot is a recreation based on the recovered pages available at The Teletext Archive.