Franchise: Star Fox

F-Zero has several tie-ins with the Star Fox series. The character James McCloud shares the name of Fox's father from Star Fox, and the characters have many other similarities:
• They wear the same outfit.
• Both drive drive ships powered by G-Diffusers that were designed by a company named "Space Dynamics".
• F-Zero's James McCloud also is the squadron leader of a space combat team known as "Galaxy Dogs", a clear parody of Star Fox, and his partner, a man named O'Donnell, is a likely reference to Star Fox's Wolf O'Donnell.
• In F-Zero X, James McCloud even states the he "drives like a sly fox", furthering the connection.

Pigma Dengar's surname is a reference to people in Japan with a Kansai dialect. In the Japanese version of Star Fox 64, Pigma speaks with a Kansai dialect. People with the dialect tend to end their sentences with the word 'dengar'.

ROB 64 in Japan is called NUS (ナウス) 64 and is named after the Nintendo Ultra Sixty Four, the original name given to the Nintendo 64 console. NUS also appears in serial numbers of various Nintendo products.

The "barrel roll" (as dubbed by Peppy Hare in the English version of Star Fox 64) that appears in many Star Fox games is not a barrel roll at all, but rather an aileron roll. In the original Star Fox, the maneuver is generically referred to as just a roll. In Star Fox 64, Peppy's iconic phrase "Do a barrel roll!" was created by the English localization team; in the Japanese version, he instead says "ローリングで弾くんだ!", which translates to something along the lines of "deflect it with a roll!" It's only in Star Fox: Assault that you can actually perform a barrel roll.