An "Ultra-Realistic" F-Zero Switch Game Was Pitched To Nintendo But Rejected

Nintendo's E3 conference gave us some unexpected revivals. Between Metroid Dread, WarioWare, and an Advance Wars reboot, one franchise which didn't get any love was F-Zero, though according to Vitei's Giles Goddard, that's certainly not for a lack of trying.

Having previously helped develop Star Fox, Stunt Race FX and 1080° Snowboarding, Goddard's most recently brought us Carve Snowboarding on Oculus Quest. However, during a conversation with GameXplain, he revealed that he tried pitching an "ultra-realistic" F-Zero game to Nintendo.

Read More: F-Zero Switch: Leaks, Rumours, News, And Everything We Know So Far

An "Ultra-Realistic" F-Zero Switch Game Was Pitched To Nintendo But Rejected

More specifically. Goddard stated:

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 try out.

So we made a demo for the Switch and PC. It was also more to show the capability of our engine – we had a multiplatform engine that was running on 3DS, Switch, PC, whatever – so 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.

But they'd all have realistic physics, like, really ultra, a bit too over-the-top realistic, so the hovering was actually caused by four jets in the bottom sort of adjusting themselves... Way too over the top. But it meant that if you killed one of the jets it would end up sinking, and if you killed the other one it'd flip over and all this kind of stuff. And it was just really fun – it was like a sandbox type thing just playing around and seeing what would happen if you caused a crash there and whatever.

It's certainly an intriguing idea, though ultimately, Nintendo weren't convinced. Advising that Nintendo are "very wary about using old IP", he confirmed that in their eyes, it would be "much easier to go with a new idea, a new IP, than to reuse an old one". After a 17 year absence, hopefully one day we'll see it return.