Reggie Fils-Aimé – former president of Nintendo of America – has commented on Nintendo’s “abandoned” racing franchise F-Zero, and hinted that no Nintendo series is ever truly dead.
F-Zero raced onto Nintendo consoles way back in 1990, but engines have been off ever since 2004’s F-Zero Climax. Interestingly, though, Fils-Aimé doesn’t think this means another F-Zero game will never happen; instead, he confirmed that the developer/publisher never “makes a conscious decision not to continue supporting” a Nintendo series.
“Why was F-Zero abandoned?” he said in an interview with VentureBeat. “The insight I would share is that, at least during my tenure, Nintendo developers were always experimenting with different gameplay styles, always thinking about where a unique experience could be applied back, either to an existing franchise or maybe creating a new franchise.
“My bet is that somewhere in the Kyoto development centers, some developer is playing around with an idea that might be applied to F-Zero. It’s never a situation, at least in my experience, where the company makes a conscious decision not to continue supporting X-Y-Z franchise. Historically it just hasn’t worked that way, not when I was there.”
Does that mean we’ll definitely get another F-Zero game, 20 years after the last? Sadly not. but it does suggest that Nintendo’s innovations and advancements mean there is always a chance a brand-new idea may resurrect an age-old series… even if that series is 30 years old now.
Did you know that a realistic F-Zero was reportedly turned down by Nintendo? That’s according to a developer who made the pitch demo.
Last year, Giles Goddard – an ex-Nintendo developer and Vitei CEO – opened up about what the game was and detailed why they thought Nintendo ultimately turned it down.
“I thought it would be really cool to have an ultra-realistic F-Zero, still with sort of really cool futuristic graphics, but just really realistic physics – we thought that’d be a really interesting thing to try out,” the Star Fox developer – who was one of the first Western employees at Nintendo – said.
However, the pitch was turned down and Goddard seems to think that whilst most studios love expanding established IPs, Nintendo seems to be much more cautious.
“Nintendo is very wary about using old IP because it’s such a huge thing for them to do,” they added. “It’s much easier to go with a new idea, a new IP than to reuse an old one.”
While there is still no new F-Zero on the horizon, here are all the upcoming Switch games to keep you busy instead.
Writer. Guardian. Spartan. Silent Hillian. Little Sister. High Chaos. I also write for other fine places including the BBC, Eurogamer, and GamesIndustry.biz, and have a weekly games column at NME.