F-Zero artist thanks Nintendo for bringing the series back

The former Nintendo artist who created the characters and vehicles in F-Zero has thanked Nintendo for bringing the series back.

Takaya Imamura worked for Nintendo between 1989 and 2021, and was the main art director and character designer of the F-Zero and Star Fox series.

The last F-Zero game was released in 2005 and in recent years Imamura has expressed his wish to see the series return, including in an interview with VGC.

That wish finally became a reality today when Nintendo announced F-Zero 99, a massively multiplayer version of the SNES original, during its latest Nintendo Direct.

F-Zero 99, which is avaialable today, is based on the original SNES F-Zero, but features 99 players racing against each other.

Imamura took to Twitter to express his happiness at seeing the series’ return, posting a photo of a happy Captain Falcon with the message “thank you Nintendo”.

In 2021, Imamura said he believed the series wasn’t dead but was still “hard to bring back”.

In a separate interview with VGC earlier this year, Imamura – who left Nintendo in 2021 – said he’d like to see the company outsourcing a new F-Zero to a third-party developer.

During that same interview, Imamura said he believed one of the reasons we hadn’t seen a new F-Zero was “because Mario Kart is Nintendo’s most popular racing game, and a new F-Zero would cost a fortune”.

It appears that F-Zero 99 solves this problem, because it was likely made with a fraction of the development cost that would be required from a fully-fledged, modern Switch sequel.