Video Game / F-Zero (1990)

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F-Zero is a 1990 racing game published by Nintendo. It's the first game in the F-Zero series, being a launch title for Super Nintendo Entertainment System both in Japan and North America.

The backstories in the manual provide the plot for the racing. The year is 2560, and mankind's intergalactic encounters with alien civilization made it possible to hold "F-Zero", a new futuristic Grand Prix inspired by the Formula One races of old but with racing circuits full of super-magnetic technology and dangerous obstacles. As one of the four F-Zero racers, your goal is to complete all five courses in each League circuit.

Nintendo had published two Mission-Pack Sequels for the Satellaview, BS F-Zero Grand Prix in 1996 and BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 in 1997. There was also a novelization by Katsuyuki Ozaki titled F-Zero: And Then, To the Gods of Speed.

Tropes featured in F-Zero include:

• All There in the Manual: The background information about your pilots, machines, and the racing tournament (the titular F-Zero) is all in the instruction manual — which also provides information on how to control the machine. Nintendo uploaded the English version in its entirety in preparation for Super NES Classic Edition.
• Big Boo's Haunt: While Port Town itself is not particularly scary, the music begins with a spooky, quiet tone to it which matches the stage's perpetual twilight. Not helping matters are structures in the horizon that resemble gaping mouths.
• Chess Motifs: The cups are named Knight, Queen, and King - all coincidentally sharing a name with a chess piece. Oddly enough, in the Japan-exclusive BS F-Zero Grand Prix, the newly-added 4th cup does not share this motif, but instead takes from Playing Card Motifs as it's named the Ace league.
• Competitive Balance:
  • The Golden Fox has the best acceleration and turning speed but is fragile, has the worst top speed, and has the worst traction, making it a gimmicky vehicle to drive that requires a very skillful pilot to exploit its high turning speed.
  • The Blue Falcon has high acceleration and turning speed; but has bad traction, a mediocre top speed, and is somewhat fragile.
  • The Wild Goose has maximum durability, has mediocre acceleration, has a mediocre turn speed, has a high top speed, and has good traction; making this a balanced vehicle.
  • The Fire Stingray has the maximum top speed, good durability, the worst acceleration, the worst turning speed, and maximum traction of the four, with the last attribute making it the best beginner's vehicle in this game. This vehicle is also very powerful, but requires a lot of skill and planning to exploit its maximum normal top speed by properly planning where you use your boost to bypass the Fire Stingray's poor acceleration and then maintain your normal top speed for as long as possible after your boost expired.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Unlike later episodes, the other racer cars cannot die even when falling off the track, and there will always be someone on your tail no matter how fast you go (even if you exploit your boost and jumps to get further ahead than it's physically possible to follow, they're still right there on your six). There's also the issue of the A.I. breaking the laws of physics and momentum. On easier difficulties, opponents can get slowed down if you ram into them at a certain angle. On Expert and Master, the A.I will never slow down if you hit them and a simple tap from behind is enough to send you veering sideways, losing a lot of speed in the process.
• Do Well, But Not Perfect: While you need to remain above a certain placement in order to proceed to the next course, each Grand Prix only really requires you to get first place in the last course for the entire thing to be considered won.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • The game contains no multiplayer mode whatsoever; unlike all of its successors, it is solely a single-player game.
  • There're no pilots in the game, only racing machines. Any information about the pilots are confined to the manual. There're only four named pilots (Captain Falcon, Dr. Stewart, Pico, and Samurai Goroh) with the rest filled by generic vehicles. There are also no female characters here, either. It wasn't until F-Zero X that the roster was completed with all unique characters.
  • Speaking of the pilots, the tie-in comic in the manual shows Dr. Stewart as a comedic Handsome Lech character rather than the more serious personality he would have in future games.
    "I shall win to honor beautiful women everywhere!"
    "Hey Falcon! Why don't you stick to making money with your gun and leave racing to the masters of the art, like myself."
  • The game keeps track of your points during the Grand Prix, which increases depending on your position at the end of a lap and rewards a spare machine (F-Zero's Video-Game Lives) for every ten thousands points. This was dropped in the sequels.
  • It has a Rank Out system where the player has to finish each lap within a certain tolerance. It starts at generous 15th place in the first lap, but gets higher each time until the final lap demands you to finish within 3rd place, else you fail. Falling too far behind the flock (below 20th place) is also an instant disqualification. This was removed in the sequels except F-Zero: Maximum Velocity, an intentional Retraux, and F-Zero 99, a battle royale.
  • The game doesn't have the Cast from Hit Points Boost Power capabillity introduced in X. Instead, the player gets a Super Jet per lap past the first lap, which can be consumed for temporary speed boost like a power-up. This was dropped in the sequels except Maximum Velocity.
  • When your machine's power meter drops below certain threshold, it significantly loses speed to the point you're in a serious danger to rank out of the race unless you're close to the finish line or Pit Row areas. This was removed in X due to introducing the Boost Power gameplay.
  • CPU opponents do not necessarily have an absolute position on the track. Notably, the opponent immediately behind you is never more than a few seconds behind, no matter how fast you're going. This is most notable when exploiting shortcuts: Take the normal route and the CPU will follow closely and not take the shortcut, but take the shortcut and the CPU will follow suit.
  • In Grand Prix mode, there's no concept of overall standings. As long as you finish each race (which requires meeting the Safe Rank at the end of each lap and not crashing out), the game counts it as a win.
  • The machines' top speeds are relatively low around 437-478 km/h. Starting from F-Zero X and excepting Maximum Velocity and 99, top speeds are 700 km/h at the minimum.
  • Tracks are only named for the environment they take place in, and aren't given more specific subtitles to indicate the design of the course like in later games (such as "Mute City: Figure Eight" in F-Zero X and "Port Town: Aero Dive" in F-Zero GX). If one environment is host to multiple courses, they will simply be distinguished by Roman numerals, e.g. "Red Canyon I" and "Red Canyon II". Even Maximum Velocity, which otherwise borrows a lot of cues from this game, has track subtitles.
  • Multiple courses in the same environment are just extended or harder variants of the base course, with the sole exception of White Land II. Later games would feature more unique courses for each environment.
  • The series' signature Vehicular Combat mechanics are absent. There's no Side Attack or Spin Attack and opponent machines other than the flashing bumpers can't be destroyed.
  • The game leans deeper into the "successor to Formula One" motif by featuring twisting flat courses, unlike the later, 3D-rendered games which don't make any mention of F1 at all and instead use courses that emphasize speed and rollercoaster-like designs.
  • Only one of the four machines has a number on it: the Blue Falcon, which is numbered #111. Later games give every machine a number, with the Blue Falcon being renumbered as #07.
  • Only seven of the game's 15 courses are available in Practice mode; the other eight can only be raced in Grand Prix. Later games make all courses playable or at least unlockable for Time Attack, with the exception of Maximum Velocity due to Revisiting the Roots and the secret courses (along with the frozen and festival variant courses) in F-Zero 99.
• Easy-Mode Mockery: The credits can't be reached on Beginner and Standard difficulties.
• Every 10,000 Points: You get a spare machine for every 10,000 points you earn during races.
• Formula-Breaking Episode: Despite sharing the same graphical environment as White Land I and having a remix of its theme, White Land II is not a Remixed Level but a completely separate track.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: The game mechanics are explained in the manual as being the rules of the F-Zero Grand Prix, as if they actually exist in-universe. That said, there is also a bit of Gameplay and Story Segregation regarding the rule on Safe Ranks, since it explains that pilots who don't meet the Safe Rank at the end of each lap are disqualified, but this only ever applies to the player and not any of the CPU opponents, who get to keep racing if they don't meet the Safe Rank.
• Gusty Glade: The two Death Wind courses have a constant gust that blows your machine towards the sides of the track.
• Harder Than Hard: The Master difficulty is unlocked when you beat any league on Expert.
• Have a Nice Death: When you crash your machine, the camera slows down and rotates 180 degree to show the wreckage of your machine.
• Losing Horns: A melancholic jingle plays if you Rank Out (cross the start/finish line under the Safe rank, or fall to 20th place).
• No Fair Cheating: Trying to take a developer-unintended shortcut by exploiting the jump pads (most notably on both iterations of Port Town) will result in a flying saucer dragging your vehicle back to an earlier section of the track.
• Remixed Level: If you see a Roman numeral 'I' attached to a course name, it will have a 'II' or even 'III' variant with a partial alternate route:
  • Mute City II replaces the back straightway from Mute City I with a circular fork, and features two jump pads instead of one. It also takes place at dusk as opposed to Mute City I's midday.
  • Mute City III restores the back straightaway but adds triangular bumps on the sides to make it more dangerous to collide with the barriers, adds a minefield on the S-curve, and removes the jump pads entirely. It takes place at night.
  • Port Town II is an extended version of Port Town I, featuring a snaking path between the magnetic strips and the home stretch.
  • Death Wind II features a chevron-shaped section replacing the back straight, littered with chicanes and boost pads that, due to their placement, can plunge the player into a wall if they are not careful with their alignment against the pad.
  • Red Canyon II also extends the portion of track just before the home stretch. Notably, it features a shortcut where the player must hit a jump pad, and hold down to slow their descent and land on an arrow made of jump pads to complete the shortcut.
• Rubber-Band A.I.: If you are in first place, the opponent behind you will always be just behind you no matter how fast you go. So you can be driving the Fire Stingray and maintaining its top speed of 478 km/h, but if the Golden Fox with its stated top speed of 438 km/h is in second, it can keep up with you despite supposedly being 40 km/h slower.
  • Here's proof. The TASer glitches the hell out of the game to do laps in under 10 seconds each and the A.I. is still right behind him the entire time. And here's an even worse example, with laps in three seconds of in-game time. This is possibly the most egregious example of rubber-band A.I. in the history of video games.
• Shows Damage: When it has taken enough damage for its top speed to go down, your vehicle starts smoking and sparking. Also, backmarkers that have taken enough damage to explode if your vehicle touches them flash pink.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: The two courses set in White Land are set in a snowy environment where the tracks have more ice zones than other tracks that have it.
• Subsystem Damage: Your vehicle's top speed drops significantly if you take enough damage. In this state, your vehicle starts smoking and sparking, an alarm sounds, and your Life Meter flashes. You need to get to the pit area quickly in this state in order to get repaired enough to get out of this state.
• Tech-Demo Game: With Pilotwings, F-Zero was one of the launch games that demonstrated the "Mode 7" capabilities. It also promoted stereo sound of the SNES, which its manual encourages to listen to.
• Unbuilt Trope: F-Zero has been credited for popularizing the futuristic racing subgenre on home consoles, inspiring numerous followers like WipEout and Rollcage. However, unlike the games that followed it, F-Zero lacked the Vehicular Combat component. There's no point in clashing with rival cars because they're invincible anyway; the game is all about going fast. While the sequels would introduce Spin Attack, the simplistic design was still respected in the F-Zero series, as the combat is limited to melee (notably refraining from Mario Kart item battles that many imitators feature) and didn't take priority over the series' main feature, the speed.
• A Winner Is You: Each difficulty's ending has as much plot as what came before: None. It simply urges the player to beat the game on a higher difficulty again. On Master difficulty, you're still left with a short message.
  The race is over...
  You are an F-Zero master!!
  Goodbye

  From Captain Falcon and the F-Zero crew.