In early 2013, several months into the Wii U’s commercial struggles, this site ran a rumor claiming Nintendo had a first-party racing simulator in development that was meant to compete with Sony’s Gran Turismo and Microsoft’s Forza. The post drew 22 backlinks and circulated through the European Nintendo press chain.
Twelve years later, with the Wii U long discontinued and Switch into its second generation, the question of what actually happened to that rumored racing sim has a clear answer: it never shipped, in any form, on any Nintendo platform.
What Nintendo actually shipped in racing
Nintendo’s racing portfolio across the 2013–2025 period stayed in the kart and arcade-racer space. Mario Kart 8 launched on Wii U in May 2014 and was ported to Switch as Mario Kart 8 Deluxe in April 2017, eventually selling more than 75 million units across both platforms — making it Nintendo’s single best-selling Switch title of all time.
Beyond Mario Kart, the Switch received Fast RMX (2017, Shin’en’s launch-window arcade racer), Super Sonic Racing (2017, Sega), various Crash Team Racing ports, the Mario Kart-adjacent Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit AR product (2020), and F-Zero 99 (the surprise 2023 battle-royale F-Zero release on Nintendo Switch Online). No first-party Nintendo simulation racer in the Gran Turismo or Forza mold has ever appeared.
Why the rumor failed
The structural reason is straightforward. Nintendo does not develop or publish licensed simulation racers and has not done so in any meaningful capacity since the Famicom era. The closest historical exception was the Mode-7 racing of F-Zero on SNES, which was an arcade-style futuristic racer rather than a sim. Nintendo’s internal expertise — and EAD’s, and now EPD’s, design language — does not include vehicle-licensing pipelines, real-world physics simulation engineering, or partnerships with car manufacturers for digitization.
A first-party Nintendo competitor to Gran Turismo would have required either acquiring an external studio with the relevant capability (Nintendo did not do this in the period) or a multi-year ground-up build with risks that did not match Nintendo’s typical greenlight criteria.
What the rumor was probably reading
The most charitable read of the 2013 rumor’s source is that it accurately described an early-stage internal exploration that never advanced beyond the discussion phase. Nintendo runs prototype work continuously across many concepts that never reach production. A pitch deck or research project for a sim racer is plausible; a greenlit production target for one is not.
Less charitably, the rumor may have been a confident inference from external observers that Nintendo would feel competitive pressure to enter the simulation racer market, dressed in language that suggested insider sourcing. The Wii U’s third-party drought had created widespread speculation about how Nintendo would fill genre gaps, and “Nintendo’s Forza answer” was a recurring thread on NeoGAF and similar forums in early 2013.
The longer-tail context
The Wii U’s commercial struggles in 2013 made any first-party gap-filling announcement an attractive rumor target. Sites that picked up the racing-sim claim were operating in a news environment where Nintendo’s silence about its long-term plan was driving speculation. The rumor served the press demand for any signal of Nintendo’s strategic response.
What Nintendo actually did in response to the Wii U’s commercial weakness was very different from what the 2013 rumor cycle predicted. Rather than entering new genres to broaden the platform’s appeal, Nintendo accelerated its hybrid-hardware strategy work that became the Switch by 2017. Genre expansion was not the answer; platform consolidation was.
About this URL
The original 2013 post was hosted on the Ning community blog. Modern WordPress rewrites legacy URLs onto this flat slug. This retrospective scores the original claim against twelve years of Nintendo’s actual racing-game lineup. For Nintendo coverage, see the Nintendo section.