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We all thought the same thing when we saw the zero-gravity stuff in Mario Kart 8 – where’s the new F-Zero game from Nintendo?
The answer – there isn’t one. And there may not be one for a very long time.
"I certainly understand that people want a new F-Zero game," Nintendo design boss Shigeru Miyamoto told IGN. "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.
"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 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."
Is there an irony in Nintendo saying that it’s not planning on a new F-Zero because it can’t think of anything new to add? After all, one criticism often levelled at Nintendo’s feet is that it has consistently failed to evolve any of its key brands arguably since the days of N64.
