Details surface of an F-Zero Switch game prototype
Unmute city.
New details have surfaced of an F-Zero Switch game prototype.
YouTube channel DidYouKnowGaming interviewed ex-Nintendo programmer Giles Goddard, who now runs his own studio (Chuhai Labs - Cursed to Golf, Carve Snowboarding). Previously he worked on Super Mario 64, Star Fox, and 1080 Snowboarding.
In 2021, Goddard hosted a reddit AMA where he admitted F-Zero was his favourite game on the SNES and that his studio had created an F-Zero prototype with ultra-realistic physics that was never released. DidYouKnowGaming dug deeper.
After that AMA, he told GameXplain: "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".
Further, he said he was stuck in a catch-22 with Nintendo where his pitch was refused due to a lack of people on the team, but Goddard needed that money to increase the team size.
In a new interview with DidYouKnowGaming, Goddard revealed more on the prototype's physics.
"It was super fast, super chaotic, super realistic physics, so it feels like F-Zero, but there's a lot more depth there... It was quite interesting to see what situations you could get the entire race into," he said.
"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."
Each vehicle had four jets and when damage was taken, it would affect the jets differently by, for instance, impacting steering or causing a flip.
The core of the prototype, though, was "massive multiplayer", which included 16 human players online and 16 AI (so 32 total in each race), and a map editor with courses shared with friends. It was planned to run at 60fps on Switch.
Although Goddard agreed with DidYouKnowGaming to release a demo of the prototype, this fell through for legal reasons.
The last major console release for the series was F-Zero GX on the GameCube, released back in 2003.
Fans have been eager to see a new game in the series, but Nintendo appears to have no plans. Back in 2013 Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto said he didn't have a strong enough idea for a new game.
It seems not even Goddard's online multiplayer racer was enough.
You can check out the full story in the video below.
