Trivia / F-Zero

• Blooper: During Chapter 4 of GX's story mode, there's a brief moment where the wings on Captain Falcon's helmet clip through the Blue Falcon's windshield. Later in the chapter, Captain Falcon's hand clips through it.
• B-Team Sequel: Every game following X was developed by studios other than Nintendo EAD. Maximum Velocity was developed by NDcube; GX and AX were developed by Sega's Amusement Vision; GP Legend and Climax were developed by Suzak Inc, and 99 was developed by Nintendo Software Technology.
• Colbert Bump: While F-Zero sales have always been modest, its fandom expanded immensely with the inclusion of Captain Falcon in Super Smash Bros. Later, the appearance of a downloadable Mute City and later Big Blue in Mario Kart 8 increased the clamor for a new F-Zero game even further.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: IGN once referred to Captain Falcon as "Blue Falcon," the name of his vehicle.
• Creator Backlash: While Shigeru Miyamoto doesn't dislike F-Zero, he doesn't care about it as much as the other Nintendo franchises he's helped create (as noted by series co-creator Takaya Imamura), being far more enamored with Star Fox and Pikmin — to say nothing of his more successful series. He was genuinely surprised when told during the Wii U era that there was a lot of Twitter support for a new F-Zero game, as due to the series' declining sales, he believed that people had grown tired of the games.
• Dummied Out:
  • GX contains a mode simulating the frontend and tourney structure of AX accessible through cheating devices, although calling it "the complete F-Zero AX" as it's often described as is a bit of a misnomer as it does not simulate the very different physics the actual F-Zero AX game has.
  • GX and AX both contain unused profiles for the characters' vehicles. Many of them are in Engrish and The Skull's is missing entirely. Strangely the Prima strategy guide has its own descriptions of the vehicles, some of which are nearly word-for-word copies of the unused ones, meaning Prima somehow got access to some concept data.
• Fandom Life Cycle: Stage 2. While several installments of the series have broken a million copies, the fandom remains rather small. It is arguably only saved from being Stage 1 thanks to its content making appearances in other franchises like Super Smash Bros. and Mario Kart.
• Fan Translation: Full English ones are available for both X Expansion Kit and Climax.
• Flip-Flop of God: Deathborn's Evil Plan in GX gets this treatment within the game itself, possibly overlapping with Motive Decay. Is he going to destroy the universe or simply reign supreme over it? Story Mode suggests the former, his post-GP interviews say otherwise.
• Franchise Killer: Nintendo was eager to turn F-Zero into one of their big franchises and bankrolled an anime series. Unfortunately, the show ended up being a ratings flop, especially in North America. The two Recursive Adaptation Game Boy Advance games also did extremely poorly, with F-Zero: GP Legend and Climax becoming among the worst-selling first party games for the handheld. Since then, Captain Falcon has now become more associated with Super Smash Bros. than anything else, and while games like Nintendo Land and the Mario Kart series pay tribute to its courses and music, it would take nearly two decades before Nintendo would release a new installment in the form of F-Zero 99, an online Battle Royale Game for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers.
• God Never Said That: For a while, it was believed that Nintendo of Europe approached Criterion Games with the request to make an installment for the Wii U, in hopes that the developer could create a vertical slice in time for the console's unveiling at E3 2011. Years later, Alex Ward (who was head of the studio at the time) elaborated that this wasn't quite the case. While someone from Nintendo did ask him about the studio potentially making an F-Zero game, the request came from a junior employee at NoE who was just shooting out ideas for their personal dream games. Ward directed him towards Criterion's owner Electronic Arts and didn't hear anything afterwards. He then followed by saying that even if that conversation continued in a serious capacity, with both EA and Nintendo desiring such a project, he would have rejected it on the basis that he dislikes the franchise and thus be the wrong person to produce a new entry.
• He Also Did:
  • F-Zero GX was made by Amusement Vision, the same team as Super Monkey Ball, which might explain the former's incredible difficulty and electronic/trance soundtrack. They also helped with the development of Daytona USA 2001, another racing series that was actually inspired by F-Zero.
  • Also applies retroactively, as Amusement Vision was eventually retooled into Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, the team behind the Like a Dragon series.
  • GX's pilot themes were composed by Daiki Kasho, best known for his work on the Gran Turismo series.
• Inspiration for the Work: Batman (1989) was a huge inspiration on the whole franchise. During a visit to America, series co-creator Kazunobu Shimizu had seen the movie in theaters, and became inspired to give the original F-Zero an American comic book aesthetic. The instruction manual even came with a mini-comic, done in the same style, to tell the backstory of the game.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • With the failure of the Nintendo 64DD (Disk Drive) add-on, the F-Zero X Expansion Kit is probably one of the rarest N64 games out there alongside its fellow 64DD titles. That didn't stop online communities from doing their damnedest to make sure the game never truly died out once it was finally dumped, even overhauling emulators specifically to be able to play 64DD titles because of it.
  • Foregoing the Satellaview games (with most of that console's library in general being an example of this anyway), Cult Classic and fan-favorite GX has never left the GameCube, leading to secondhand prices being astronomical.
  • GP Legend was re-released on the Wii U Virtual Console in Japan, but no where else in the world. Those who live outside Japan will still need a physical cartridge to play it.
• No Export for You:
  • F-Zero X Expansion Kit, which was released for the Nintendo 64 Disk Drive, an add-on that never released outside Japan due to poor sales. The Expansion Kit offered new courses, a Car Editor, a Course Editor, and a brand new remix of Rainbow Road's music from Mario Kart 64. Some of this content, namely the Super Cars for Captain Falcon, Jody, and Goroh and their corresponding outfits, are still present in NTSC-U and PAL copies of the game but are rendered inaccessible as a result.
  • F-Zero Climax, which never left Japan due to the poor sales of GP Legend.
  • The two BS titles are this by default, as the Satellaview was an add-on for the Super Famicom.
  • Downplayed with F-Zero AX. The intention was that you'd bring your GCN memory card with you, plug it in while playing, and download all sorts of tracks, parts and racers for use in F-Zero GX. And it worked quite well... assuming you were within driving distance of the mere ten or so cabinets procured by North American arcades, and assuming that cabinet didn't have the memory card slot disabled (such as the one that used to be in Las Vegas's Circus Circus arcade). While all AX content could be unlocked in GX by completing Story Mode missions (or using a cheat device), the number of people who got to experience the interactivity as originally intended is quite low.
• The Other Darrin: Samurai Goroh, while voiced by Yasunobu Iwata in the anime, he is voiced by Akio Ōtsuka in the Smash Bros games, starting from Brawl.
• Recursive Adaptation: F-Zero: Legend of Falcon inspired the F-Zero: GP Legend GBA game (it's also called Falcon Densetsu in Japanese), as well as the Japan-only F-Zero Climax. Yep, Ryu/Rick's there.
• Referenced by...: In The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Mario has a poster in his bedroom that has a car resembling one of the ones from F-Zero on it.
• What Could Have Been:
  • If Nintendo of America hadn't refused to export the Famicom Disk System game Famicom Grand Prix II: 3D Hot Rally, F-Zero would have never existed. Kazunobu Shimizu, the designer of the game, was told that the game wasn't "cool enough" for American kids and it wouldn't sell, so he was inspired to use the new SNES and its Mode 7 technology to design a much cooler, more futuristic racing game.
  • The original sequel to F-Zero was going to be called Zero Racers (or G-Zero). It was a pseudo-3D racer and replaced Dr. Stewart with a newer character named Origammy. Nintendo Power previewed it and a prototype was seen at the 1996 E3 trade show. Because it was for the failed Virtual Boy, this sequel never saw the light of day.
  • An earlier attempt at making a sequel to F-Zero for the SNES was planned to have split-screen multiplayer. The game eventually became Super Mario Kart, spawning what would ironically become Nintendo's more successful and well-known racing series.
  • Former Nintendo programmer Giles Goddard pitched a physics-based Nintendo Switch iteration of the franchise with his studio Chuhai Labs. Nintendo was receptive to the prototype, but the game wasn't greenlit due to them deeming the studio too small to work such a title compared to how much money was requested for the project.
• Word of Dante: Many fans apparently are under the knowledge that Captain Falcon's full name is Douglas Jay Falcon, when in fact the name was something added to a now-defunct F-Zero website by Nintendo of America, which Nintendo of Japan or any of the games do not recognize at all. To date, that website was the only source of this knowledge, which was enough to convince many fans that the name was canon.

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