One of only two launch titles for the Super Famicom, Nintendo put a lot of faith in F-Zero. While Mario provided a familiar face to millions of potential 16-bit adopters around the globe, F-Zero was intended to provide the “wow” factor in regard to the system’s technical capabilities. That’s exactly what it did, forever changing the course of racing games in the process.
“As mesmerizing to watch as it was to play…”
“We knew we were going to need a racing series for the new Super Famicom console,” producer Shigeru Miyamoto said in the 1994 book, Introduction to Game Design. “We didn’t want to do a port of a pre-existing game, and in our first drafts the screen was horizontal and you viewed the ships from their side. During the prototype phase we tested various ideas, getting a feel for the capabilities of the new [Super Famicom] hardware as we went. It turned out that with the horizontal view for F-Zero, the perspective didn’t allow us to draw three-dimensional objects like bank curves, and without that, how could the game be interesting?”
“On top of that,” Mr. Miyamoto said, “we wanted to draw player character vehicles that looked more alive and vigorous, but if we added tires to the vehicles the required memory would be doubled. And if you added smoke from the tires during drifting, it would be even more. So because of all that, the cars became hovercrafts.”
Similar racing and driving titles up to this point had mostly used smoke and mirrors to give a sense of movement, often placing the player vehicle on a figurative conveyor belt, driving in place while rival vehicles and environments moved toward them. More recent titles attempted fully polygonal graphics, but at the cost of speed and frame rate due to the intense computational power required. The Super NES’s Mode 7 allowed for a background layer to rotate and scale on the fly, more fluidly simulating a 3D effect.
Combined with the game’s unusual (at the time) futuristic setting and the Super NES’s increased capacity for displaying colors, F-Zero was a visually vibrant and immediately exhilarating event, as mesmerizing to watch as it was to play. Like the game’s official story says, it was the future of racing.