The video game industry is a harsh mistress as franchises come and go throughout the generations. For a company as old as Nintendo, it’s unsurprising that an untold number of their IPs and mascots have faded into obscurity, or simply been buried as their relevancy waned. F-Zero, Nintendo’s well-known high-speed racing game, looks to be another franchise that will be placed in the vault indefinitely; as Shigeru Miyamoto said in a recent interview that Nintendo has no plans to bring back the racing series.
In the wake of Mario Kart 8’s reveal, some long-time fans of the racing franchise might have taken the new hover carts and the spiraling, unrestrained tracks that take wild vertical twists as elements borrowed from the F-Zero series. Miyamoto was questioned about these coincidences, and if a new F-Zero could still be a possible project for the future. Unfortunately for the racing franchise, while Miyamoto did bring up the possibility that F-Zero might have inspired some of Mario Kart 8‘s gameplay, Nintendo simply does not know which direction to take the series in the future.
“I certainly understand that people want a new F-Zero game,” Miyamoto said. “I think where I struggle is that I don’t really have a good idea for what’s new that we could bring to F-Zero that would really turn it into a great game again. Certainly I can see how people looking at Mario Kart 8 could see, through the anti-gravity, a connection to F-Zero. But I don’t know, at this point, what direction we could go in with a new F-Zero.”
Further in the interview, Miyamoto was also asked about the possibility that he simply felt some franchises like F-Zero were suited to older generations of Nintendo hardware, and didn’t have a place in modern gaming.
“It’s tough,” Miyamoto said. “We come to the show and we bring a lot of great franchises and everyone says, ‘Oh, well, where’s this game that I want to play? Where’s something new?’ I only have so much capacity. [laughs] Obviously in the past we’ve tried to work with other companies, where we’ve let them develop games for us in franchises like Star Fox and F-Zero, but the more we think about it, the more we prefer to be able to create those games internally, on our own. We’ve obviously, as I mentioned, been working on what we can do to increase our internal staff in a way that will allow us to have more projects going at the same time, so we can create new games and work on additional old IP and still maintain the other primary franchises that people want to see.”
This is quite some disheartening news for long-time F-Zero fans, especially as the franchise finds itself in limbo after nearly a decade of inactivity. Will Nintendo possibly make another F-Zero game in the future? We will simply have to wait and see if this classic racing series can make a comeback.
