Star Fox Assault was actually informally announced in May 2002, several months before its predecessor, Star Fox Adventures, would actually hit store shelves.

In May 2002, Namco and Nintendo announced that that they would be collaborating on several GameCube games, one of which being a new Star Fox game in the same vein as Star Fox SNES and Star Fox 64. Nothing else was revealed except for a tentative logo (dubbed at the time as "Star Fox GC") and poster, and the fact that it would be developed by the same team within Namco who worked on the Ace Combat series. This turned out to be not true, as the final game was developed by different Namco employees at the time, with Tsuyoshi Kobayashi as the producer, Toshiyuki Nakanishi as the All-Range Mode director, and Yutaka Yoshida as the Battle Mode director.