I’m a sucker for a good deep dive on anything. I’ll watch documentaries until my eyes bleed. My favorite right now is this Secret Base supercut on the history of the Seattle Mariners. It’s one of the best sports documentaries I’ve ever seen. So of course, when I saw that Nintendo rolled out their “Ask the Developer” deep dive interview for Mario Kart World’ I was all over it. And it didn’t disappoint.
We could have gotten ‘mARIO KART 9’ IF THEY WERE JUST THROWING ANOTHER GAME WITH NEW TRACKS OUT
Kosuke Yabuki, the producer of Mario Kart World was asked about the title of the game and if World was always the plan or if they considered calling it the ninth title in the series. He said:
“If the idea had just been to add more courses, then I think we would’ve called it Mario Kart 9. But, that wasn’t our approach this time. We wanted to take the series to the next level. So, we decided to drop the numbering this time and go with a completely new title, Mario Kart World. So, we’d already added “MARIO KART WORLD” to the concept art from the early stages of development.“
And then we get a look at some of the concept art. One with a slightly more conventional version of the logo, and one that feels very old timey but may actually be a bit more interesting to me than the one we got. The more I look at it, the more I absolutely would have loved seeing it on some box art. Not that the current one is bad, it’s just boring compared to that old school style banner.
tHE ‘MARIO KART WORLD’ TEAM FOCUSED ON ONE WORD: PLAYFULNESS
I’m always amazed when people can take one word and create something from it. Visuals, articles, it doesn’t matter. It’s all incredible to me. At one point in the interview, Masaaki Ishikawa, the Art Director on the game, mentions that “we wanted to convey the feeling of adventure. We also wanted to create a lively, bustling atmosphere even in a vast world…During those discussions, someone on the team mentioned the key phrase “playfulness.”
And from there, they were off. What they described was a game that visually was inspired by Super Mario Kart. Which was made cleared by the comparison picture they put up with the Mario Kart 8 version of Mario next to the Mario Kart World version. And just like that, I saw the difference. It was something that I hadn’t really paid much attention to. I knew the game looked great and that it appeared more vibrant, but seeing the actual design choices in a comparison made me appreciate the gameplay videos even more.
The open world
With the extra processing power of the Nintendo Switch 2, the developers could do a lot more with the environment as far as weather and connectivity of the world. But what I found the most interesting was the discussion of the game’s day/night cycle.
Shintaro Jikumaru, who led the planning team for Mario Kart World noted that they “designed it so that a day in the game passes in around 24 minutes. You easily get a sense of how time passes in the game, since it happens faster than in real life.”
Ishikawa continued: “when there’s a particular scene we really want players to see, we didn’t think such a feature would work, as players might drive through that location at the rather bland time between evening and night. So, I discussed this issue with the programmers, and we decided to focus on the most appealing times of day and dramatically shorten the transitions between day and night.“
They clearly have the confidence in what they built to account for people playing each session long enough for a day/night cycle in the open world to matter. An open world Mario Kart is a big swing, even with Nintendo’s reputation for quality. I think back to all the times I’ve played Mario Kart in the past and yeah, the sessions go past 24 minutes. But that’s race to race with some loading in between. Having a world to explore does change some people’s willingness to explore longer sessions. So, it’ll be interesting to see how people interact with the game over time. There’s a lot more that I didn’t cover here, these are just a few of the things I found most interesting in my time reading it. But it’s all worth a read.
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