Vitei founder pitched an “ultra-realistic” F-Zero game, but Nintendo passed on it

Speaking with GameXplain, Vitei founder Giles Goddard revealed that the company once pitched an “ultra-realistic” F-Zero game. In the end though, Nintendo passed on the idea.

Goddard said the following about the pitch:

“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, and just hundreds of the cars using AI to sort of race each other. But they’d all have realistic physics, like really ultra, sort of 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, playing around and seeing what would happen if you caused a crash there and whatever.”

GameXplain followed up by asking if Nintendo passed on the pitch – to which he confirmed. Regarding how the situation unfolded, Goddard explained:

“Yeah, 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 idea, a new IP, than to reuse an old one.

We were stuck in a catch-22 working with Nintendo because we’d say to them, ‘We wanna do this F-Zero game. Can you give us all this money?’ And they’d say, ‘Well you don’t have enough people.’ And I’d say, ‘Well if we had the money we could get the people,” you know. So it was forever this ridiculous catch-22 with them wanting us to make a game, us pitching a game, and then them saying you don’t have enough people. Alright, so what do we do? Do we just find a lump of cash from somewhere, then get the people, then go back to you with the proposal? So it was difficult working with them.”

Fans continue to wait for a new F-Zero game. The last entry in the series, F-Zero Climax, came out in 2004 on the Game Boy Advance – but only in Japan. The last worldwide title was GBA’s F-Zero: GP Legend.