Unreleased F-Zero Virtual Boy game Zero Racers “was done”, former NOA staffer says

Back in the day, Nintendo was planning a new F-Zero game for the Virtual Boy known as Zero Racers. Although the game never released, it was apparently finished.

That news comes from former Nintendo of America staffer Jim Wornell, who worked on the project as the localizer. Wornell handled the game’s text, boxart, manual, and testing.

Did You Know Gaming has Wornell mentioning the following:

“As an associate producer… I wrote screen text, manual and package text, took screenshots, oversaw the debug and approval process, liased with NCL, worked with marketing and advertising, etc. Anything that had to do with the North American launch of a game was my responsibility. G-Zero, later known as Zero Racers, was on my list of projects… Zero Racers was done. We had a complete manual, package, and label done for the game, it went through lot check, it had an ESRB rating. It was complete.”

Wornell also revealed some interesting details as to how testing was done for the Virtual Boy:

“When they were testing people out for Virtual Boy, they had us go through this… did you ever see the movie Clockwork Orange? The scene where the person’s pinned down in the chair, and they’ve got their eyelids open? That was kind of like what Virtual Boy testing was like. They would dilate our pupils, they would have us sit with our heads in this vice type thing, and they would shine light in our pupils. They would have these plastic rods, they would have them just barely touching our eyes — and they would say ‘okay no matter what, don’t blink for a minute.’ They put us under just the most bizarre tests, just to make sure I guess to make sure the thing was safe to use. They would blow air into our eyes, they would have us play a Virtual Boy test kit for 10-15 minutes, then we’d have to rest. Then they’d dilate our eyes again. 2 or 3 rounds of these just bizarre, inhumane torture tests just to make sure this thing wouldn’t kill me, or blind me, or whatever. But umm… yeah, it was interesting.”

You can check out the full Did You Know Gaming video on Zero Racers below.

The Virtual Boy ended up being one of Nintendo’s worst-performing products from a financial perspective. That’s what ultimately what led to the company deciding against releasing Zero Racers.