F-Zero inspired by back Back to the Future Part II, Batman

Takaya Imamura had a legendry career at Nintendo where he spent over thirty years at the company, working on franchises like F-Zero and Star Fox.

In a recent interview with Famitsu, Imamura shared some insight into the inspiration for F-Zero. Along with the second Back to the Future movie, it also looks like the team was influenced by Tim Burton’s Batman. He went as far as to say that director Kazunobu Shimizu wanted to emulate the Batmobile. 

Our translation of the interview excerpt is as follows:

Since before release, the new device (Super Famicom / SNES) rose to the level of a social phenomenon, didn’t it?

Imamura: At that time, magazines like Famimaga had articles that said things like “This is the future!” and “The screen’s rotating function is amazing!”. Because the internet was still not popular and the state of information was truly not there, I was deeply surprised when I saw a screen working during development.

And then, this lead to F-Zero, the first game you worked on?

Imamura: That is correct. The tastes of the director Kazunobu Shimizu and myself matched, the movies “Back to the Future Part Two” and “Batman” (Tim Burton) were being screened at the time, and there was a lot of talk about it by both the public and between the two of us.

The former had a flying DeLorean time machine, but the latter had the amazing Batmobile which was gaining popularity.

Imamura: The Batmobile was particularly cool. We were also strongly influenced by that point and I think the director wanted to do that in a game. I feel the director created the base world and I added the characters and designs.

Imamura left Nintendo to kick off 2021. He’s now just about to launch a new Switch game Omega 6: The Triangle Stars – you can read more about it here.

Thanks to Famitsu for publishing the original interview.

Translation provided by Simon Griffin, SatsumaFS, and Philip Proctor on behalf of Nintendo Everything.