Mario Kart World was originally planned for Nintendo Switch 1

Mario Kart World was originally planned as a game for the current Switch, Nintendo has revealed.

That piece of information comes from an official interview that went live today. The team was finding it a challenge to incorporate everything it wanted to do, including ramping up from 12 racers to 24 players. Programmer Kenta Sato said various sacrifices were considered, including “toning down the visuals, lowering the resolution, and we even considered dropping the frame rate to 30 FPS in some cases.” However, the move to Nintendo Switch 2 allowed for everything to be kept intact.

Producer Kosuke Yabuki added: “We worked on it while kicking the can down the road in terms of deciding what to give up on, so at some point, we knew it was going to get messy. But as we’d decided to release Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – Booster Course Pass, we thought that would give us a bit more time to continue development. 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. It was truly a ray of hope.”

Yabuki would bring up the idea of moving the game to Nintendo Switch 2 in 2020. Sato said “our worries to evaporate all at once” once the decision was made.

He noted:

“When we were developing for Nintendo Switch, we often worried whether we could find the right balance between planning and performance. Of course, the Switch system’s performance is sufficient for developing different kinds of games, but if we had included everything we wanted to in this game’s vast world, then it wouldn’t have run at 60 fps and would have suffered from constant framerate drops. I think there were a lot of people on the team who were worried about whether we could really manage it. But once we decided to release this game on Switch 2, we expected our worries to evaporate all at once. I remember being overjoyed when I discovered we could express even more than we’d originally set out to.”

Art director Masaaki Ishikawa also shared:

“Of course, the graphics needed to be more detailed. But like Sato-san, I also felt like it was outweighed by the sense of relief. From the beginning, the designers were saying they wanted to make the art richer, so I thought we could achieve that now. For example, team members who were creating the terrain in the scenery were really happy because they could now place more trees, which were key to giving the world a more natural look.”

We also heard from the team today that development of Mario Kart World started in 2017. Further details can be found here.