Nintendo

When we will be next to death's door and Earth will we burn, we will have FZeroGX 99.

…but there will not be enough human being left to fill a race.

Can’t wait!

Ah, the Elder Scrolls approach

Good point. The lore of the game is that these are all crooks and bounty hunters and this racing thing is a side-gig. A racing-themed science-fiction open-world game is an obvious fit for that.

...That sounds kind of amazing. I don't know how happy F-ZERO fans would be with that, but Smash gave Captain Falcon enough fighting moves that it could kind of work.

The focus should stay on the racing. The mechanics need to be solid, there needs to be enough tracks, the works. The singleplayer would need to primarily be about racing, since it's rare that a game can be two genres at once and succeed. But the structure can be flexible!

You play as Captain Falcon in a somewhat open world. You can drive around freely in the Blue Falcon. The world is very large, but the Falcon is very fast so it's fun to explore. There are oodles of races to be had, but you have to drive to them in order to participate. At any point you can hop out of the Blue Falcon and, like, start punching stuff. Captain Falcon runs pretty fast, has his Falcon Punch, has most of his moves from Smash and more. You could also tweak the Blue Falcon's stats and look as you go. It would still be the racing game that F-ZERO fans want, but it would also attract people who weren't interested in F-ZERO but like Captain Falcon in Smash and want to play as him rather than his vehicle.

to be fair, that was - bizarrely - a sega game

You'd have to add more content, yeah - more track elements than just mines, jumps, pain-borders, wind, and boosters. Maybe some way to control bumper-spawning as a track-design element or something.

I'm now revising my idea: "Combined F-Zero + Super Mario Kart maker". 1 Mode7 track editor, 2 games, 1 product. Post the best tracks to F-Zero99 as F2P content, make the editor, track-browser, splitscreen, and SMK the paid value-add.

Glorious chaos. The game eases you into it with a few races with only 10 or 20 computer-controlled opponents. The first true 99 race was astonishing. I like the way they have everyone abreast in a standing start, and then spread them out with a few obstacles before funneling them onto the actual track so it becomes a rolling start, but without random chance determining the start order.

It's so much fun. If you've got a paid Nintendo Switch Online account, go play it it's a free download with NSO. That said

1. The super-short track list is repetitive as hell, they're currently only running the 4 of the 5 Knight League tracks in normal rotation... and realistically OG FZero only had 15 tracks and half of them were retreads with minor variations so it will still be a problem when they launched Queen/King leagues.

2. With 99 players constantly brawling, big rewards for ramming an enemy player to death, and some random speed-boost drops, the gameplay feels really random because of emergent factors. It's very chaotic. It's fun, and I've seen competitive streamers get sucked in so there's obviously enough skill involved to keep them engaged, but still there's a lot of races where you'll do everything right but still lose badly. My only first-place finish was blind luck.

Same dude I just played it after reading about it. It's still technically 3.99$ for Nintendo online play. But damn if it isn't fun.

I'd say vehicle weapons is right out and is the line where it ceases to be F-Zero, but I don't see how RPG mechanics or open-world preclude including racing challenges with an extreme skill ceiling. I mean, with the current Soulslike fashion trend I'd say they could market based on that, particularly with Armored Core 6 demonstrating how "RPG elements with a very low stat ceiling" works well with skill-based gaming.