Mario Kart World Started As A Switch Game, But Switch 2 Let Nintendo Realize Its Vision

The road for Mario Kart World has been a long one, as its developers have revealed the Nintendo Switch 2 launch title started development in 2017 as a Switch 1 game.

Details about the history of Mario Kart World's development were just one detail of many to come from Nintendo's Ask a Developer interview series, where one of the game's producers, Kosuke Yabuki, said that prototyping for Mario Kart World began eight years ago in 2017 and that the decision to move the game to Switch 2 was "truly a ray of hope."

"We were thinking about what to do for the next Mario Kart game even during the development of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and we began prototyping in March 2017," Yabuki said. "It was at the end of that year when we officially started work on it as a project."

Many of Mario Kart World's defining features, like its open world and support for 24 players, were there almost from the start of development, as was the game's name. Even in early development the team used the Mario Kart World name instead of calling it Mario Kart 9, as the team wanted to move away from the strictly track-based gameplay the series had been known for.

Meanwhile, the increased player count led to technical challenges when developing for the original Nintendo Switch, according to Mario Kart World's programming director Kenta Sato. He said it was "difficult to incorporate everything we wanted" when developing on Switch 1, and that the team was "always conscious" of what sacrifices were being made.

"We discussed things like toning down the visuals, lowering the resolution, and we even considered dropping the frame rate to 30fps in some cases," Sato said. "It was a tough situation."

The team kept "kicking the can down the road" in terms of what to scale back on, before the release of the Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Booster Course Pack gave the team more development time, Yabuki said.

"That's when the conversation of moving it to the Nintendo Switch 2 system came up, and this suddenly opened up a bunch of possibilities on what we could do," Yabuki said. "It was truly a ray of hope."

Mario Kart World will release alongside the Switch 2 on June 5. Nintendo has previously detailed Mario Kart World's Free Roam mode as well as its playable characters and confirmed items, and more recently put to bed speculation that it had used AI to generate certain billboards in Mario Kart World.