F-Zero GX - Development and Audio

Development and Audio

At the All Nippon Amusement Machine Operators' Union event in mid-February 2002, Nintendo announced that an arcade system board under the name of "Triforce" was being developed in conjunction between Nintendo, Namco, and Sega. The idea for the arcade board originated after discussions between Sega and Namco about the capabilities and cost effectiveness of the GameCube architecture to make arcade games. A month later, an announcement from Sega and Nintendo revealed Sega's subsidiary Amusement Vision and Nintendo will collaborate to release F-Zero video game titles for the Triforce arcade board and the Nintendo GameCube. Nintendo revealed the first footage of F-Zero GX at the Pre-Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) press conference on May 21, 2002. While the game was known to exist several months prior, it had remained behind closed doors until that conference.

In early March 2003, according to the official Nintendo website, F-Zero was delayed by two months. Via a live video conference call from Japan on July 7, 2003, co-producers Shigeru Miyamoto and Toshihiro Nagoshi, and supervisor Takaya Imamura answered questions about the two F-Zero games. There, Miyamoto announced the Japanese version of the game was finished and would soon be available to the public. Nagoshi mentioned that back at E3 2003, he was hoping that they would have that time to include a local area network (LAN) multiplayer mode, however they chose not to support this mode. The development team focused more on the game's single-player aspects, and a LAN multiplayer mode would distract greatly from it. Imamura commented that even though he worked directly on F-Zero throughout its different incarnations, this time he took a "step back and was involved at kind of a producer level at looking over the game." Imamura added "hav worked on the F-Zero series, and seeing the results of the collaboration with Sega, I found myself at something of a loss as to how we can take the franchise further past F-Zero GX and AX."

F-Zero GX/AX Original Soundtracks, a two-CD set composed of BGM soundtracks to the video games GX and its arcade counterpart, was released on July 22, 2004 in Japan under the Scitron Digital Content record label. The soundtracks features an array of songs from rock and techno musical styles composed by Hidenori Shoji and Daiki Kasho. The first disc consists of forty-one tracks composed by Kasho and the second has forty composed by Shoji with an additional track rearranged by Supersweep's AYA (Ayako Sasō) of "Big Blue". Kasho composed the character themes with lyrics by Alan Brey and both Shoji and Kasho were supervisors of its audio mastering.