This Futuristic Racer Is Headed To The Wii U

Does that look like a nice screenshot? It’s from a game titled Fast Racing Neo, being developed by Shin’en Multimedia for the Wii U.

F-Zero hasn’t been around for a while, and Wipeout appears to be on a hiatus as well. In the absence of the two franchises, a number of smaller developers that aren’t affiliated with either Nintendo or Sony have stepped up to try and fill the void of futuristic racers. Shin’en are one of these developers.

In 2011, Shin’en released a game titled FAST – Racing League for WiiWare. The fast-paced racer ran at 60 frames-per-second with two players playing in splitscreen, and utilized a neat “phase-switching” feature that made it so tracks would have “positive” and “negative” strips that sped you up or slowed you down, depending on the phase of your craft.

FAST was well-received, and ever since, Shin’en have been working on a follow-up for the Wii U. Today, they released a single screenshot (above) from the Wii U game, titled Fast Racing Neo, and said that more information would be available next week.

Shin’en, despite being a tiny studio, are well-known in indie circles for their technical prowess, so it isn’t surprising that the screen looks as nice as it does. The studio has always prided itself on pushing technical limits, even dating back to their games on the Game Boy Advance, where they released Iridion 3D.

Look out for more coverage of Fast Racing Neo on Siliconera in the future. In the meantime, you can read up on the original FAST in this interview we conducted with Shin’en back in 2010.