The project was announced by Shigeru Miyamoto in mid-1996 during Mario Kart 64 development, initially under the working title "F-Zero 64". Tadashi Sugiyama directed and Miyamoto produced, with composers Taro Bando and Hajime Wakai. The development team was drawn primarily from key Wave Race 64 programmers. The game was first shown publicly at the Nintendo Space World event on November 20, 1997, reportedly 60% complete and already running at 60 frames per second. Maintaining that framerate forced developers to minimise texture detail, background complexity, and polygon counts on vehicles, a tradeoff that would define much of the critical conversation around the game.
Races take place on tracks that incorporate hills, loops, tunnels, corkscrews, and pipes, at speeds designed to simulate near-supersonic travel. Players choose from 30 machines — 26 new vehicles plus the four returning from the original F-Zero — each rated across grip, boost, and durability on an A-to-E scale, and adjustable before each race between maximum acceleration and maximum top speed. An energy meter doubles as a health bar and boost reservoir; it depletes through collisions, side attacks, spin attacks, and boosting, and is replenished by driving over recharge strips. If the player holds a spare machine (an extra life), they can restart a race after falling off the track or running out of energy.
The Grand Prix mode organises races into cups — Jack, Queen, King, and the unlockable Joker Cup — each consisting of six tracks across four difficulty tiers: Novice, Standard, Expert, and Master. The fifth cup, the X Cup, generates a new randomised set of six tracks on every playthrough, lacking loops and varying widely in shape. Death Race is a distinct mode in which the player attempts to eliminate all 29 other competitors as quickly as possible on a dedicated course, with the boost available from the start. Time Attack supports ghost-data racing, with up to three player-recorded ghosts per track.
The 64DD, a Japan-only peripheral for the Nintendo 64, received only one expansion disk: the F-Zero X Expansion Kit, released on April 21, 2000. It added 12 tracks spread across two new cups plus a customisable Edit Cup, a machine creator with combinable pre-existing parts, and a course editor built using tools similar to those the original developers used in-house. The disk could save up to 100 custom tracks and three ghost records per course. The Expansion Kit required the original cartridge, which had been coded from launch with 64DD detection hooks, though no further expansions were ever produced.
Critics gave F-Zero X broadly positive reviews, aggregating at 87.61 percent at GameRankings and an 85 Metascore. Praise concentrated on the 60 fps framerate — widely noted as unprecedented for a racing game with up to 30 simultaneous competitors on screen — fast and precisely tuned controls, and the abundance of courses and vehicles. The near-total absence of graphical detail was the dominant criticism, with GameSpot calling the polygon count "particularly uninspiring" and the track surfaces sparse. IGN's Peer Schneider described the controls as "god-like" and compared the experience favourably to Wave Race 64, while GameSpot's retrospective review called the game "the black sheep of the series" visually. Electronic Gaming Monthly awarded it Game of the Month for November 1998. Nintendo sold 383,642 North American copies and 97,684 Japanese copies. The game was nominated for "Console Racing Game of the Year" at the 2nd Annual Interactive Achievement Awards. It was re-released on the Wii Virtual Console in 2007, on Wii U around 2016, and via the Nintendo Classics service with online multiplayer in 2022. In 2009, Official Nintendo Magazine ranked it the 39th-greatest Nintendo game.