While racing games are a dime a dozen these days, there was a time when the systems that we used didn't have the processing power to make very many of them. F-Zero was the first one in my life that was so incredible that we actually tried to be the best at it.
Myself, and my pal at the time, bought this game a store in the box, complete with instructions before taking it home and being completely wowed by it. This is something that someone under 30 years of age might have a hard time appreciating but i think that at that time.... we actually purchased it based on box art because since the internet was a very new thing at the time it is not like would could depend on customer reviews.
When you look at this now, it is hard to understand why we liked it so much back in the early 90's but that is because we had never really seen 3-d at that point. The computers and consoles we were using were not really capable of it.
F-Zero is largely applauded for being able to be one of the first "3d" racing games that actually functioned (IE, the system didn't crash trying to process the tracks while you were playing them) and also because you could choose a number of different options for your racer such as high acceleration and high top speed.
If you chose the car with the highest top speed you better never crash, but that car's acceleration was so bad that you would almost certainly lose.
We played this game so much that we eventually discovered (without the aid of Youtube, which didn't exist at the time) parts of the track that could be skipped by hitting a ramp and pressing turbo at the same time. I was pleased to see that doing so did not result in the game crashing, but rather the AI adapting to what you had just done. Bravo Nintendo EAD .
Watching this now, based on what i have now, it is difficult for me to imagine what kept us playing. But when you look at these images and watch these vids you have to try to put yourself in the point of view of someone that was alive and at just the right age in 1991, because this game was unbelievable awesome then.
I highly recommend that you just think about this game rather than try to play it nowadays unless you are able to put yourself into a 90's mindset. I rate this game based entirely on the time period that it came out in, and how stupendous it was given that it was 1991. By the way IGN rates this as one of the top 100 games ever made - and I agree with them.