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Nintendo passed on Chuhai Labs founder's pitch for a realistic F-Zero game

Before Vitei rebranded to Chuhai Labs, founder Giles Goddard revealed his studio pitched a realistic F-Zero game to Nintendo, which was turned down.

TJ Denzer

June 29, 2021 11:00 AM

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Giles Goddard has quite some history with Nintendo. He was one of the developer’s first Western employees, a co-programmer on the very first Star Fox, and even after he left to form Vitei Backdoor (now Chuhai Labs), he still worked in collaboration with Nintendo on various titles such as Steel Diver. However, not everything Goddard wanted to do got greenlight. He recently shared various stories of things he would have liked to work on with Nintendo, including a pitch for a realistic F-Zero game which was ultimately turned down.

Goddard recently revealed these stories when he came on a recent GameXplain video interview as a guest. According to Goddard, back when Chuhai Labs was Vitei, his team pitched Nintendo an F-Zero racing game with rather unique and realism-based physics.

So what happened to it? Well, according to Goddard, it was killed by the fact that Nintendo is apparently really hard to work with when it comes to the company’s prior IPs.

Goddard mentioned in the same interview that he’d also like to return to the Star Fox series, but he’s not the only one with dreams of a new F-Zero. SEGA's Toshihiro Nagoshi (who worked on GameCube’s F-Zero GX) also recently shared that he’d love to work on a new, challenging F-Zero game. It would be interesting to see these two come together on this topic, or perhaps what could have been. But it seems like it would be a tough sell to Nintendo either way.

TJ Denzer

Senior News Editor

TJ Denzer is a player and writer with a passion for games that has dominated a lifetime. He found his way to the Shacknews roster in late 2019 and has worked his way to Senior News Editor since. Between news coverage, he also aides notably in livestream projects like the indie game-focused Indie-licious, the Shacknews Stimulus Games, and the Shacknews Dump. You can reach him at tj.denzer@shacknews.com and also find him on Twitter @JohnnyChugs.