F-Zero GX's Lost Gold Parts Are Finally Unlockable on Switch 2

Somewhere in a drawer in Japan, there’s a memory card that belonged to someone who won an F-Zero GX tournament in 2003, and on it sit five custom machine part sets that most players have never seen render. Thunderstorm, El Dorado, Chrono Symphony, Bahamut, Glacator — the Gold Parts were handed out at in-person Nintendo events in Japan, and the only way to move them onto your own save was to physically carry your memory card to the booth. Twenty-plus years later, fans have catalogued button-string codes that unlock all of it: the five Gold Parts, every AX machine, every AX course, and Dark Schneider. It works on original GameCube hardware and on the Nintendo Classics version of F-Zero GX on Switch 2.

That second part is what makes this more than trivia. F-Zero GX’s arcade-exclusive AX content has spent two decades as the racer’s most famous locked door, and a huge chunk of the GameCube library now lives on a handheld. The unlock codes do not hand you the content outright — you still need in-game tickets to buy what you’ve revealed — but they skip the requirement to clear Grand Prix on Master and Story mode on Very Hard, which for most players was the actual wall.

The Gold Parts Were Never Supposed to Leave Japan

Read the original distribution method again and the preservation stakes land hard. Nintendo gave these parts to event winners, on memory cards, at physical locations, in one country. There was no eShop download, no code card, no regional alternative. If you wanted a Bahamut-equipped machine in 2003, you either won it in person or you plugged in a GameShark. That’s the entire history of five officially licensed parts that shipped in a retail game.

Which is why this discovery matters more than the usual cheat-code nostalgia cycle. The AX machines and courses were a known quantity — arcade hardware, distributed to a handful of Japanese Sega arcade locations, preserved through emulation and modding communities for years. The Gold Parts are the genuinely thin slice: content that existed on retail discs but was gated behind an offline, regional, non-repeatable event. Now anyone with the Switch 2 Nintendo Classics version can trigger them with a controller. That’s not just convenience, it’s the closest thing to an official re-release those parts will ever get.

Four Controllers, Two Hands: The Input Problem Nobody Solved

Here’s where the handheld angle gets ugly. Five of the codes — the five Gold Parts, naturally, the ones that actually matter — require simultaneous input across four controllers. Sit with that. On a Switch 2 in handheld mode, that’s a non-starter: you’re holding the thing, you’ve got two Joy-Con 2 attached, and the code expects four distinct input devices firing at once.

So the realistic path is docked, four controllers paired, and a friend group coordinated enough to hit a nine-input string in sync. The Switch 2’s Bluetooth controller stacking is actually the easiest venue this has ever had — back on GameCube you needed four physical ports and four working pads, and a 2003-era WaveBird setup was not cheap. Same story over on Android: a Retroid Pocket 5 running Dolphin can host four mapped input devices, but you’re pairing four Bluetooth pads to a 5-inch screen to enter a code you’ll use once. Doable. Not elegant. The AX machine, AX course, and Dark Schneider codes are single-controller and largely painless by comparison — the Gold Parts are the boss fight of the cheat menu.

Dolphin Handled This Track at 60 FPS Years Ago

Worth stating plainly for anyone who’s been sitting on the GameCube rip: F-Zero GX is a 2003 title with no exotic rendering pipeline, and Dolphin has run it at full 60 FPS on x86 handhelds and modern Android devices for years. Steam Deck owners don’t need Nintendo’s blessing to access any of this — Action Replay codes have existed in Dolphin’s cheat manager long enough that the AX content is old news on that side of the fence. What’s new is the Switch 2 route, and that route comes with one unanswered question.

The codes are written in GameCube notation: X, Y, Z, and the < > shoulder triggers. Nintendo hasn’t published these sequences officially, and Nintendo Classics remaps GameCube input onto Switch 2 pads in ways it has never fully documented. Whether < and > map cleanly, whether the Z trigger lands where you expect, and whether the emulation layer registers four simultaneous wireless controllers as four distinct inputs are all things nobody has confirmed yet. Anyone attempting the Gold Parts strings on day one should expect a few failed attempts before the mapping clicks — and should report back, because the rest of us are waiting on that answer.