Nintendo on Super Mario Kart – ties to F-Zero, how Mario characters got in, items, more

Eight Guys in Overalls

One of the big features of Super Mario Kart is the ability to throw items like bananas and shells as obstacles to your rivals. How did those items come about?

Konno: Back when the guys in overalls were still driving, they could throw oil cans. Then oil would spread and the karts would slide. Oil cans seemed appropriate for guys in overalls. (laughs)

Uh-huh. (laughs)

Konno: And playing that way with eight guys in overalls was fun. When it worked we’d shout things like, “Yahoo! It worked!” (laughs) But then we switched to Mario and…

Oil cans became banana peels. But why bananas?

Sugiyama: Because of Donkey Kong Jr.! He likes bananas, and the peels are slippery, so they got the okay.

Konno: In the original game, the only CPU-controlled character who throws banana peels is Donkey Kong Jr., which was a way to characterize the characters.

You made it possible to use banana peels, and then you started thinking about other items.

Sugiyama: Yes. We wanted something for shooting the karts ahead of you and wondered what would suit the world of Mario, and that was shells! (laughs)

Konno: We wanted something that could home in on opponents, and that turned out to be the Red Shell.

There’s also Lightning.

Sugiyama: We added that in the final stages of development.

Konno: We wanted an item with the potential for a sudden upset.

So Lightning is an item that’s likely to appear for the player racing in last place.

Konno: Right. When it came to that, we put a lot of effort into creating just the right balance. The amount of gameplay we put in for making adjustments was incredible for that time.

And aside from playing the game, I hear you actually checked out real karts, didn’t you?

Konno: Yeah! We went to Nemu no Sato, a recreational resort in Mie Prefecture. Apparently, the name has changed and it’s a different place now.

What was the goal of that research?

Konno: The word “kart” immediately calls to mind go-karts, but what we had in mind for the game were serious racing karts. We wanted the programmers to try driving one, get a feel for the physics of the movement, and make use of that in programming

I see.

Konno: And the whole staff was only seven people, so it wasn’t going to be a huge logistical challenge. But when I went to Miyamoto for permission, he gave me an earful, saying, “Why? Can’t you tell what they’re like without driving them?” (laughs) But somehow I got the okay.

And it was helpful, wasn’t it?

Konno: Very much so!

The Kart Goes Kaboom!

What about the recreational resort proved informative?

Konno: Riding in an actual kart, we could feel considerable g-force. And it helped give us a sense of the low perspective.

Sugiyama: The greatest objective was experiencing drift.

Konno: You realize when you actually drive a kart that one little slip-up causes the kart to spin. It’s a difficult sport, and no matter how we might have explained that to the programmers, they wouldn’t have understood. So we thought we should have them go and actually drive some karts, but…

But…?

Sugiyama: Those karts were tuned so they wouldn’t slide much. (laughs)

Konno: And they weren’t high-speed enough to spin.

So how did it work out?

Konno: We zoomed around the track and said, “Well, that was fun!” (laughs)

(laughs)

Konno: But we learned that karts are fun in general.

That was the main benefit. (laughs)

Konno: Yeah. (laughs) Super Mario Kart looks fun, but we tried really hard to make it feel realistic. So much that we tried out driving real karts!

Sugiyama: Uh-huh.

Konno: We also paid attention to their internal construction, so we actually built a remote-control kart.

Sugiyama: Right, we did! (laughs)

You did? (laughs)

Konno: It was the real deal, with an engine rather than just an electric motor.

Sugiyama: It was big—over 50 centimeters, I think.

Konno: And since we were making one, we wanted it to be fast, so we replaced parts and so forth, and didn’t hold back tuning it up, and we even painted it striking colors. We have always been into mechanics. We gave it a test run at the head office and it was really fast!

Sugiyama: And very loud! (laughs)

That engine, huh? (laughs)

Konno: We wanted the programmers to control it and experience drifting, and we thought it would help with the design work. So we showed them an example and turned it over to the main programmer.

Mm-hmm.

Konno: And in five seconds it crashed into a wall! (laughs)

Huh?!

Konno: (raising both hands) Kaboom! It was pulverized…and that was the end of it. (laughs)

(laughs)

Konno: It was beyond repair. (laughs)

Sugiyama: That was the end of it! (laughs)

So it wasn’t useful at all. (laughs)

Konno: Well, we had built it, so we had learned how karts are constructed, but we barely got to see how it handled before we had to throw it away!

“A Bit Miraculous”

I’d like to change the topic. Sugiyama-san, what was Super NES like for you?

Sugiyama: One selling point of that game console stemmed from its ability to enlarge, reduce and rotate the graphics. It was a struggle figuring out how to use that in making a game.

But compared to NES, you could do more, so it was also fun, wasn’t it?

Sugiyama: Yes. We could use many more colors compared to NES, so we could do quite a lot more.

It must have been like getting a new toy.

Sugiyama: Yeah, it was like that.

How about you, Konno-san?

Konno: I had been making NES games ever since joining the company, so Super NES was the first time I experienced the change from one generation of hardware to the next. I remember I was very excited.

Super Mario Kart came out within two years of the release of Super Famicom [5], so I was surprised to hear that development only took one year. And it started as a two-player version of F-ZERO!

5. Super Famicom : A version of the Super NES released in Japan on November 21st, 1990.

Konno: Yep. If the Super NES hardware had allowed for showing tracks with long straight lines in a split screen, we may have made F-ZERO 2.

Then Super Mario Kart would never have been born!

Konno: That’s right. We could only make twisting tracks, and we adopted karts in order to make that fun, and we found that something was lacking with just eight karts racing around and around, so we tried putting in oil cans and were like, “Whoa! It slipped!” …And that was how it came about!

And the oil became banana peels, and you brought it all together in a year.

Konno: That’s right.

And you went to a recreational resort and even smashed up a remote-control kart! (laughs)

Konno: Uh-huh! (laughs)

After all that, Super Mario Kart became the top-selling game in Japan for Super Famicom. And it’s amazing how it became a series with many installments.

Sugiyama: In that respect, it was a fortuitous project. At first, we didn’t at all intend to head in the direction it eventually took, but because of various constraints, it went that way out of necessity—which is a bit miraculous.

Konno: What’s more, Miyamoto didn’t upend the tea table on us!

Sugiyama: That’s a miracle, too! (laughs)

Miyamoto-san was satisfied with the course of development?

Sugiyama: I believe so. (laughs)