All fans of the fast-paced, futuristic Nintendo racing series F-Zero want is a new game for the Switch. Dormant since the Gamecube’s F-Zero GX in 2003, fans have had to settle instead for appearances by series hero Captain Falcon in the Smash Bros series as the only confirmation that Nintendo hasn’t forgotten about the franchise.
But it seems there have been attempts internally to get F-Zero‘s motor running again.
Spotted by Eurogamer, a recent video on the DidYouKnowGaming YouTube channel with ex-Nintendo programmer Giles Goddard provided a few details on an F-Zero prototype for the Switch that never saw the light of day. Goddard was a long-time programmer at Nintendo, having worked on games like Super Mario 64, Star Fox 64 (or Lylat Wars to us Aussies), and 1080 Snowboarding. These days, Goddard runs his own studio called Chuhai Labs, which made games like Carve Snowboarding and a Ruby Innes favourite, Cursed to Golf.
It’s been known that Goddard worked on an F-Zero Switch game for a while. He first mentioned the prototype during a Reddit AMA last year, where he spoke about taking an approach to the series that involved ultra-realistic physics. In his chat with DidYouKnowGaming, Goddard shed a little extra light on the project, and why it was ultimately shelved, calling it “super fast, super chaotic.”
The decision to run with hyper-realistic physics had an interesting effect on the course of a race spent flying around at hundreds of kilometres per hour. “You could bump one car, it would bump into two other cars, and they would bump into the rest of the pack and it would cause an entire pile-up. … So it was just fun playing around and seeing how badly you could screw up the race … A fresh take on F-Zero would’ve been really cool.”
One of the prototype’s biggest differences was its focus on large-scale multiplayer, with a 32-car online mode (16 humans with 16 AI) and a course editor that would let players share homebrew tracks with friends.
In an older interview with GameXplain after his Reddit AMA, Goddard explained a few of the reasons the prototype ultimately didn’t go anywhere. “Nintendo are very wary about using old IP, because it’s such a huge thing for them to do, it’s much easier to go with a new IP than to reuse an old one.” He also spoke about Nintendo rejecting the pitch due to a lack of human resources on the team, despite part of the pitch depending on the funding to scale up the size of the team.
Nintendo has said on several occasions that, despite testing several ideas internally, it hasn’t found the right idea for F-Zero to warrant resurrecting the franchise.
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