F-Zero GX Proves the Switch 2 Can Bring GameCube Rarities Back to Life

F-Zero GX is one of the greatest games that Nintendo has ever released, and one of the greatest racers from anyone, period. No caveats needed, just the facts: it’s a stellar achievement made possible by the combining of Nintendo’s prodigious talent in this arena along with Amusement Visions, the internal Sega studio headed up by Toshihiro Nagoshi.
Nagoshi’s credentials should be familiar, but just in case: his career started at Yu Suzuki’s AM2 studio, where he was the designer on Virtua Racing, director of Daytona USA, director and producer of Shenmue, and then, after the founding of Amusement Visions, the creator of Super Monkey Ball and Like a Dragon/Yakuza.
This was not only the joining together of former rivals Sega and Nintendo for a project—one that Nagoshi and Shigeru Miyamoto had hoped would someday happen before Sega had even retired from console manufacturing—but it also involved Sega’s other rival, from the arcade side: Namco. The three companies all partnered together to create the Triforce arcade board, which was basically a souped up GameCube, and it ran the arcade version of F-Zero GX, known as F-Zero AX, as well as various Virtua Striker games and the Namco/Nintendo-developed Mario Kart GP games.
Basically there’s no reason to have ever believed that a game like this would have existed. Namco and Sega had been trying to one-up each other for even longer than Nintendo and Sega had, with their feud in the arcades spilling over into the console side when Namco partnered with Sony for the Playstation, leaving their prior partner—the one they essentially invented the concept of “third-party studio” with, Nintendo—behind in the process. All three joining forces might not seem so odd now in a world where something like Project X Zone 2 exists, in one where Sega has been a third-party developer longer than they were in the console business, but in the early aughts? Inconceivable.
All of which must be why Nintendo eventually decided that F-Zero GX maybe shouldn’t exist, after all. The game was successful when viewed through the right lens—a first-party racer that sold 1.5 million copies worldwide isn’t exactly going to be confused for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe—which is to say once you remember that the GameCube ended up in under 22 million homes. Still, it didn’t move the needle in the same way that the non-deluxe version of Mario Kart 8 did for the Wii U.
While it has been quite fairly recognized as the logical endpoint of F-Zero as a concept—I once described F-Zero GX as feeling “like you’re trying to fly a fighter jet at full speed through a crowded mall,” and meant it as the highest possible praise—Nintendo didn’t bother to re-release it on the Wii like they did some other GameCube classics that deserved a second chance on a more popular console, such as Pikmin and Pikmin 2 or Donkey Kong Jungle Beat. Their rationale was that it wasn’t going to incorporate the same kind of motion controls and IR-pointer uses as those games had. And then the Wii U wasn’t backwards-compatible for GameCube games like its predecessor, and didn’t include them as a Virtual Console offering even though Wii games were, so by the time the Switch came around the world had suddenly gone an entire decade and then some without easy access to F-Zero GX. That only continued with the Switch, as well, which means by the time 2025 rolled around it had been almost 22 years since F-Zero GX’s one and only official release. And that becomes a significant problem when you consider that there were only so many copies of the game out there… which is why it’s still going for an average price of over $80 secondhand in the present.