F-Zero Would Be Hard To Revive, Would Need A “Grand Idea,” Says Series Art Director

Like many major companies that have been going on for an extended period of time, Nintendo has a lot of properties. You know the big ones, of course, the Marios and Zeldas, but there’s also plenty of games that are more in the cult status that never quite managed to hit it big. One of those was F-Zero, a racing series that began on the SNES and had some high-profile revival attempts in the Gamecube and GBA era that flopped and the series has since been on the shelf. Could it come back? Well, it’s not impossible, but it sounds like it’d need a big kickstart.

Takaya Imamura worked at Nintendo from 1989 to 2021, and was the Art Director and Character Designer on the F-Zero franchise. He spoke with IGN about his long career at the video game giant. He reflected on a lot of things, but when it came to F-Zero, he surprisingly said he didn’t think the series was actually dead, though did say it would take a lot for it to revive. Specifically, he said, “Of course, I’ve thought about it many times, but without a grand new idea, it’s hard to bring it back.”

While the series lives on with Captain Falcon being playable in Super Smash Bros., the last game in the series to be released was in 2004. While stranger things have happened, I wouldn’t put a lot of money on that one getting much of a grand idea for a revival.