The story of F-Zero GX and F-Zero AX should be a familiar one by now to PTB readers.  As you'll recall, owners of the GX home version can take their GameCube memory card with save game data to the arcade, plug it into an AX machine, and bring tracks, cars, and racers back home to the GX version of the game.  It can be an expensive proposition to collect all of the AX elements, and of course there's no guarantee that you'll be able to find an AX machine in your area.  Fans of Nintendo's F-Zero franchise have been searching for one of those mythical F-Zero AX arcade units for years, but now it turns out that the complete arcade game has been hiding inside the F-Zero GX home game all this time.  The Cutting Room Floor details how to bring the hard to find arcade game out of hiding with the aid an Action Replay.

Curiously enough, F-Zero GX contains all the code required to play F-Zero AX on the GameCube. Using the Action Replay code below, F-Zero GX will boot into F-Zero AX.

The video shows unlockable racers and widescreen mode, which shouldn't be possible without further codes, unless AX loads them from the GX save file.

It shouldn't be a surprise that GX contains all of those AX elements are in the GameCube version of the game since it's possible to unlock them a piece at a time, but finding the entire AX experience in there is fantastic.  It's a shame that an Action Replay is required to access it though.  Hey, Nintendo and Sega, is there some very secret code that'll open this up through regular means?  It's been ten years now since both of these games were released.  What's to be gained by keeping the secret any longer?  It's not like there's a glut of AX machines out there that could still be earning tokens.  Is the complete AX game included on the disc so that the data between AX and GX versions can be shared more efficiently?  TCRF has done great work digging this up, but I want to know why it's there at all.  This news just raises further questions!

(via RetroCollect)