The Nintendo Game That Was So Perfect It Killed its Own Franchise

You might say that Nintendo is the house that Mario built, but there’s so much more to the Japanese company than the little plumber covered in overalls. The original Nintendo Entertainment System was really the console that started it all.

Nintendo produced some of the world’s beloved properties and still, to this day, keeps innovating in new ways. However, there was one franchise that was so phenomenal that the company decided to kill it for its own good.

F-Zero GX‘s Success Forced Nintendo to End the Franchise

Long before Mario Kart established itself as Nintendo’s racing franchise, it had shared the spotlight with F-Zero. The franchise was first released on Super Nintendo back in the 1990s and was considered to be the most realistic racer game of its time.

However, the franchise ultimately peaked with F-Zero GX, which was released for GameCube in July 2003. It elevates its predecessor’s premise with gravity-defying courses, energetic soundtracks, and breakneck races. Seriously, it offered a gameplay that felt faster than the racing title and creative environments that’ll impress even today.

The game managed to shop over 1.5 million copies worldwide and was a massive success for Nintendo despite the fact that the company had lost the hardware war in that era.

Nintendo had managed to get a successful IP under its belt. However, the company didn’t follow up with any games in the franchise for years after the release of F-Zero Climax. That might seem like a stupid move, considering the industry-wide trend to capitalize on the most successful IPs until they’re dead.

However, F-Zero GX was such an incredible title that Nintendo didn’t have a shred of an idea of what they could add to make the game better. The company waited for twenty years before they finally came up with new ideas, revived the F-Zero franchise, and turned it into a battle royale game.

F-Zero GX Producer Wishes to Work Again With Nintendo

Even though F-Zero GX is GameCube’s defining title, it’s still quite a niche franchise series when compared to Nintendo’s biggest franchises, such as Zelda and Mario. Despite that, the franchise has a dedicated following and is still regarded as one of the best franchises in the Japanese company’s catalog.

While chatting with VGX, the former F-Zero GX producer, Toshihiro Nagoshi, stated that if given a chance, he’ll use all the knowledge he has gained over the last decades to work on the series again. He reveals that he has very fond memories of the title, and it was where he learned to craft high-quality titles that satisfied gamers.

It’s clear that veterans and even developers want to see an F-Zero comeback. In the last couple of years, we’ve heard rumors that the remaster has been in development, but no official announcement has been made about that.

All we can do is hope that Nintendo will listen to the series’ dedicated fanbase and give it a brand-new entry. We can only imagine how the F-Zero‘s incredible racing experience would feel on modern-day hardware.

With that said, would you like to see Nintendo revive this iconic racing game series? Let us know in the comments below.