From laughter to competitions at a very funny 60 km/h. The mold from which each and every karting game is born has its own name: Mario Kart. The perfect balance between Nintendo magic and the passion for arcade driving. The result: unmeasured success and frightening numbers. But what if I told you that originally Super Mario was not part from the game and it wasn’t in Nintendo’s initial plans either?
In fact, the SNES classic Super Mario Kart added Mario and friends three to four months into the game’s development. Which is a lot considering that development times in the days of the Beast Brain were very different from those of today’s blockbusters. The next question begs the question. who was driving?
Before the project was renamed Super Mario Kartin the Nintendo offices they were working on two parallel ideas: the SNES mode 7 technology opened the door to a type of driving that was unusual on consoles thanks to the possibility of manipulating, rotating and scaling a texture that was used as a circuit, achieving cutting-edge experiences on desktops such as F-Zero o PilotWings. That’s where the other idea comes in: offering those sensations for two players.
In an interview with Satoru Iwata for your Iwata Question sectionand on the occasion of the launch of Mario Kart Wii, the former president of Nintendo sat down to talk with Shigeru Miyamoto, Ideki Konno (who co-directed the SNES classic) and other developers of the house to learn about the evolution of the saga, whose only ambition was to offer a driving game that followed in the footsteps of F-Zero, but could be enjoyed in split-screen multiplayer.
In fact, as Miyamoto recalls, this was not even a sequel to those futuristic races, but something completely new and original. So, why was mario used? In fact, in the first pilot of the game’s prototype, he was already wearing a vest very similar to that of the Nintendo superstar. However, instead of bananas, he was throwing cans of oil.
At first, it wasn’t a racing game. There were just two karts that moved around on their own. Then, we realized that it was fun to stop one of the karts and watch the other one fly past you.
We decided to try out how Mario would look in one of the karts and we all agreed that it was even better this way. Who knows? Maybe the designer who drew the guy in the overalls intended for him to be changed to Mario all along! (Laughs)
Although Miyamoto told the story as if it had been a natural move, Ideki Konno recalled that it took three to four months from the start of development until the decision was made to go with the aesthetics we know today and the Nintendo characters. What’s more, the prototype already had two karts running at the same time and both had a guy wearing a bib in them.
Super Mario, Donkey Kong and even Princess Peach all made their way into a driving game that is practically a genre in itself today. Would that revolutionary game have worked so well commercially without them? It’s clear that They knocked down many walls both for players and fans and for those who were not so keen on the more realistic driving titles, but did like to have fun skidding and throwing shells of all colours.
In any case, that small decision to change the pilots for Super Mario and company was one of the greatest successes in the history of Nintendo: only Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has sold more than 60 million copies worldwide. And counting.
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