If you were hoping that out of E3 you would get a small teaser trailer featuring Captain Falcon's hero theme song from the end of F-Zero GX and a possible hint towards a new game for Nintendo's Wii U, think again. The company has no plans for F-Zero coming to their latest console... for now.
IGN managed to get in word with Mr. Nintendo, Shigeru Miyamoto, the brilliant mind behind many of Nintendo's long-running top-end franchises, and when pressed about a possible next-generation rendition of their hover-car racing series, Miyamoto stated that...
"I certainly understand that people want a new F-Zero game," ... "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. 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."
He doesn't have a new idea? Wow, this is like the complete opposite of the thinking over at Activision where fish and dogs is enough to call their milked-beyond-recognition Call of Duty series “next-gen”. Yet on the opposite side of the court we have Nintendo not wanting to over-milk their sub-brands because they don't have a worthy-enough idea to make it “great”.
In a way, I love that way of thinking because it makes us yearn for a return of this series and when it finally does happen, many of us have our wallets waiting and our bodies ready.
Some gamers and even journalists, suggested that Nintendo out-source the IP sort of like they did with some of their other titles... but then you run the risk of things like Metroid Other M. However, as it stands, the main drawback, right now, is that Nintendo is kind of stretched to capacity and Miyamoto makes note of this when he says...
"We come to the show and we bring a lot of great franchises and everyone says, 'Oh, well, where’s this game that I want to play? Where’s something new?' I only have so much capacity. [laughs] 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. 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."
Good man, and I agree.
While a lot of industry analysts such as Michael Pachter (and ilk of a similar kind) constantly want Nintendo to abandon the console race and focus on multiplatform releases for other consoles, I think right now Nintendo is the only pure gaming company out there with a console in tow. If they need to take time to get good IP out there or new entries in old IP, then they should take the time they need to make historically significant games.
Let's not forget that it was Nintendo who bailed the gaming industry out of its crash during the 1980s and with history prone to repeat itself, I wouldn't be surprised if the Big 'N' had to do it again. Unlike some companies out there, they really do put quality over quantity and it shows in how their first-party titles sell. In fact, out of the three million or so install base of the Wii U, their titles Nintendo Land and Super Mario Bros. U each have over 2 million SKUs shipped, according to
[[ ah ref http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/sales/software/wiiu.html ]] Nintendo's own stats.
If Miyamoto needs time to reflect, find his muse and get some good ideas stored up for the next iteration of F-Zero before dropping a sequel just because everyone else is doing it, then he should take that time to reflect and think up some great ideas. It sure beats annualizing a game to the point of over-saturation.
