When I first saw Mario Kart 8 zoom in on Mario as he drove parallel to the ground and then drove upside down without any regards to gravity, I knew F-Zero's future grew even foggier.
In a discussion with Nintendo producer, Shigeru Miyamoto, he discussed the future of F-Zero and his visions for the franchise. "I think where I struggle is that I don’t really have a good idea for what’s new that we could bring to F-Zero that would really turn it into a great game again," Miyamoto explained when speaking with IGN.
Miyamoto then added, "Certainly I can see how people looking at Mario Kart 8 could see, through the anti-gravity, a connection to F-Zero. But I don’t know, at this point, what direction we could go in with a new F-Zero."
With Mario Kart 8's anti-gravity karts, how could you not make the connection to the looping tracks of F-Zero GX on GameCube?
With Super Mario 3D World, Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze and Mario Kart 8 currently in development, Nintendo's studios remain busy. When bringing up the idea of seeking help from outside developers, Miyamoto didn't gravitate towards the idea.
"Obviously in the past we’ve tried to work with other companies, where we’ve let them develop games for us in franchises like Star Fox and F-Zero, but the more we think about it, the more we prefer to be able to create those games internally, on our own."
With little desire to seek outside help, Miyamoto assures that they will continue to expand their development teams to develop games for both new and old IPs.
"We’ve obviously, as I mentioned, been working on what we can do to increase our internal staff in a way that will allow us to have more projects going at the same time, so we can create new games and work on additional old IP and still maintain the other primary franchises that people want to see."
Until Miyamoto or Nintendo thinks of a way to refresh the F-Zero series, Mario Kart 8 can somewhat fill that anti-gravity racing void when it releases next year.
Source: IGN
