F-Zero

F-Zero is a 1990 futuristic racing game developed and published by Nintendo for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and the first entry in the F-Zero series it launched.¹³ It was released alongside the Super Nintendo hardware as one of its launch titles, with North America receiving it in 1991.¹¹¹² The game places the player in hovering, rocket-powered machines that race through courses set in the future at speeds exceeding 400 kilometers per hour.¹² It is described as a game Nintendo released simultaneously with the Super Nintendo Entertainment System itself.¹²

The title is a play on “Formula Zero,” positioning the sport as something faster even than Formula One racing, with the additional meaning that the machines race in zero-gravity conditions.¹¹ Rather than putting players behind the wheel of a conventional car, F-Zero catapults them years into the future to compete in cyber races aboard hovering rocket ships.¹¹ Contemporary coverage credited the original with single-handedly creating a new racing sub-genre that would become familiar to owners of PCs and gaming consoles.¹¹

The game was built around the Super Nintendo’s Mode 7 rotation capability, which allowed a background layer to be scaled and rotated to simulate a three-dimensional racing surface.¹¹ Contemporary coverage credited the technique with producing what it called the world’s fastest, smoothest, and coolest 3D console racer, and the game is widely regarded as one of the most impressive titles of the 16-bit era.¹¹ Its vehicles were designed to feel as though they were genuinely hovering rather than driving; beyond simple left-right steering, players could lean and slide into turns by holding the shoulder buttons and stabilize the machine by tapping the accelerator.¹¹ Nintendo also gave the machines limited boosts and placed “jump plates” on many tracks so players could take shortcuts and shave off valuable seconds.¹¹

The single-player game offered fifteen tracks and four machines that handled very differently, backed by a stereo soundtrack.¹¹ Among the memorably named courses were Mute City, Fire Field, Sand Ocean, Silence, Port Town, and Red Canyon, with hazards including mines and magnets set into surfaces of varying grip.¹¹¹⁶ At the magnet-wall section of Port Town II, the player was meant to hold the L or R button according to the side the magnets were on to avoid taking damage.⁷ After release, F-Zero became a hit in part because of features such as the ability to record best course times down to one-hundredth of a second.¹²

The four vehicles — the Blue Falcon, Fire Stingray, Golden Fox, and Wild Goose — differed in their acceleration and their rate of recovering power on the track’s power-up strips, with the fastest-recovering machines also taking the fastest damage.⁷ The Golden Fox recovered power quickest, followed by the Fire Stingray and Blue Falcon, with the Wild Goose slowest.⁷ The game’s difficulty was arranged to increase gradually across leagues, culminating in the final track, Fire Field, and completing any league on Expert Class unlocked a special Master Class.⁷¹¹ A well-timed accelerator press after the third of three starting beeps, before the “GO!!!” prompt, granted an extra speed boost at the start of a race.⁷

Origins

The F-Zero series was created for Nintendo by Shigeru Miyamoto and developed by the company’s EAD division (Entertainment, Analysis and Design).¹³¹¹ It was originally created by Nintendo EAD, with later games in the series developed by outside companies.¹⁴ The original game was directed by Kazunobu Shimizu, with Yasunari Nishida as main programmer and Takaya Imamura as designer, the last of whom also worked on Star Fox.¹² Imamura has said two of the key inspirations behind F-Zero, his first project with Nintendo, were the films Back to the Future Part II and Tim Burton’s Batman.²¹ Another account traces part of the concept back to the 1985 futuristic vehicle-combat game Mach Rider.²²

Machines and characters

F-Zero introduced the pilot who would become the series’ emblem, Captain Falcon, whose given name is Douglas Jay Falcon, a bounty hunter with a background in the Internova Police Force who races the Blue Falcon.¹⁵ His rival Samurai Goroh, a bandit leader operating out of the Red Canyon, pilots the Fire Stingray, said to have been stolen.¹⁵ Dr. Stewart, a former medical practitioner, drives the Golden Fox once owned by his father, Professor Kevin Stewart, who was killed during an F-Zero race under suspicious circumstances.¹⁵ The retired military hitman Pico, an alien of ambiguous species, races the Wild Goose.¹⁵ These four machines correspond to the four vehicles selectable in the original game.⁷¹⁵ Captain Falcon went on to appear as a playable fighter in the Super Smash Bros. series, while Samurai Goroh has featured as an Assist Trophy in Super Smash Bros. Melee and Super Smash Bros. Brawl.¹⁵

Sequels and re-releases

F-Zero spawned a franchise that grew to include roughly nine games, though most discussion centers on a handful of the best known owing to a combination of limited availability and mixed reception.¹⁷ A direct sequel, F-Zero X, arrived on the Nintendo 64 in 1998, again developed by EAD.¹¹ It carried over the original’s shoulder-button leaning and added controlled skidding — pressing the opposite shoulder button while turning to skid without losing speed — along with ram and spin moves, a random track generator, four-player split-screen racing, and races against a pack of thirty machines.¹¹ It even included a Death Race track designed around knocking rival cars out as quickly as possible.¹¹ The game’s simple, low-detail graphics drew criticism at reveal, a consequence of the N64 devoting processing power to running so many vehicles at once, though contemporary coverage praised its control and track design.¹¹

The series later moved to arcades and to the GameCube; a roundtable in Tokyo in March 2002 accompanied the announcement of F-Zero GC (Working Title) and F-Zero AC (Working Title), released as F-Zero GX.⁹ A 99-player online reimagining of the original, F-ZERO 99, was released for Nintendo Switch on September 14, 2023, and drew directly on the Super NES game’s tracks and machines.¹⁶ Published by Nintendo and available only to Nintendo Switch Online members, it added Spin Attacks, Super Sparks, and an elevated Skyway, and organized its courses into Queen and King Leagues built around tracks such as Mute City II, Port Town I, Red Canyon I, White Land II, and Fire Field.¹⁶

F-Zero - Official TrailerGameSpot Trailers

The original game has been re-released repeatedly through Nintendo’s classic-game services and was included on the Super NES Classic Edition, whose 2017 launch was accompanied by a developer interview with Shimizu, Nishida, and Imamura conducted by writer Akinori Sao.¹² F-Zero GX was later made available to Nintendo Switch 2 owners through the Nintendo GameCube collection on Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack.²