At some point in the last seven years, Nintendo turned down a proposal for an "ultra-realistic" F-Zero game that might've revived the franchise, according to Giles Goddard, a former developer with the company and the founder of Steel Diver creator Vitei. Nintendo was reportedly hesitant about the idea, but more for business reasons than conceptual ones.
The first F-Zero launched on the Super Nintendo in 1990, directed by Kazunobu Shimizu and produced by Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto. Although the next entry would have to wait until 1996, it then became a Nintendo staple through October 2004, when the final game - F-Zero Climax - premiered on the Game Boy Advance. The last full-scale console release was 2003's F-Zero GX for the GameCube, and since then fans have sometimes been mystified that Nintendo would rather revisit less popular franchises like Kid Icarus.
Sometime after 2014's Steel Diver: Sub Wars, Vitei was brainstorming game ideas and came up with an F-Zero featuring "really realistic physics," Goddard said during an episode of GameXplain on YouTube, spotted by NintendoLife. The studio built a demo for Switch and PC, mostly to show off the company's engine, but also featuring AI racing hundreds of F-Zero vehicles against each other. Each craft was lifted by four continually-adjusting jets, which if destroyed could cause a vehicle to sink or flip over. That contrasts with the original F-Zero games, which used simplified arcade physics - mostly due to the processors available at the time.
Nintendo is said to have been wary about farming out classic intellectual property, however. "It's much easier to go with a new idea, a new IP, than to reuse an old one," Goddard explained. Vitei ultimately ended up "in a catch-22" - Nintendo refused to finance a new F-Zero because Vitei didn't have enough people, but Vitei was unable to hire enough staff because it didn't have the money. This may suggest that Nintendo wanted any sequel to be a flagship Switch game.
The company's go-to classic series are of course Mario and Zelda, but it does regularly cycle in others such as Donkey Kong, Kirby, and Metroid. In fact, Nintendo surprised people during E3 2021 by announcing Metroid Dread, a side-scrolling title originally intended for the DS. The move proved that the company's executives have no problem reviving dead products, so hope remains for dedicated F-Zero fans that the company will return to the classic racing franchise someday.
Making the F-Zero series novel again may be Nintendo's biggest challenge. Since 2004 any number of futuristic racing games have been released, including several in its PlayStation-based rival series, Wipeout. An updated F-Zero would have to trade on more than nostalgia by introducing new features and impressive graphics. Indeed, Nintendo might now want to wait for the Switch Pro, rumored for 2022, or even that console's successor, since the company's graphics technology as it stands now is far behind Sony and Microsoft in terms of raw power.
Sources: GameXplain/YouTube, NintendoLife