There Was A Pitch For An 'Ultra-Realistic' F-Zero - But Nintendo Turned It Down
Nintendo’s first-party titles are making something of a comeback. The classics are finally returning to the front line, with a new Mario Golf game taking to the pitch, New Pokemon Snap taking the Switch by storm and the recent announcement of the long-awaited Metroid Dread finally satiating the feral Samus fans in a return to form for the Metroid series.
It looks like classic Nintendo IPs are finally getting some more love in 2021, and while some get left behind, others are finally getting what they deserve. But among those forgotten are some series that have been begging for a return to form.
There’s few in that collection that are deserving of another shot quite like F-Zero, and as will come as sad news to fans of the series, a very real pitch for a new title in Captain Falcon’s series was brought to Nintendo - and shot down entirely. Sigh.
Nintendo’s Rejected F-Zero Reboot
Click to enlargeIn an interview with GameXplain, the developer behind Star Fox and 1080 Snowboarding made their way to Nintendo with a pitch for a new game in the F-Zero series they called “ultra-realistic”. Giles Goddard from Vitei revealed all about their big presentation;
“At Vitei, after I’d left Nintendo and started my own company, it was after Steel Diver and Sub Wars, we were trying to think of stuff to do, and 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 do. So we made a demo for the Switch and PC”.
He goes on to mention the demo itself, as they’d made something up to give to Nintendo as proof they were the team for the job - “we just made a demo of some really cool F-Zero cars going around this crazy track… just hundreds of the cars using AI to race each other.”
Why Did Nintendo Reject The F-Zero Reboot?
Click to enlargeUltimately, Goddard sites Nintendo’s reluctance to re-engage with old IPs as the reason that the project fell through. “Yeah, 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 idea, a new IP, than to reuse an old one.
“We were stuck in a catch-22 working with Nintendo because we’d say to them ‘we wanna do this F-Zero game, can you give us all this money?’ and they’d say ‘well you don’t have enough people’, and I’d say ‘well if we had the money we could get the people’, you know.”
Regardless of the reason the game fell through, we’re gutted that it did. F-Zero has been in need of some love for the 16 years since the last game dropped in Japan, so we hope that Nintendo can change their tune on the series soon enough.
