Mario Kart World was almost an original Switch game called Mario Kart 9

The latest instalment of Nintendo’s Ask the Developer series is out, and this time the focus is on Mario Kart World, which is now just a couple of weeks away.

The interview with the development team covers a lot — including a deep dive into why the Cow is in the game (which is important) — but perhaps just as notable is the revelation that Mario Kart World originally began life as a game for the original Nintendo Switch.

It turns out they had ambitions to support 24 players on Switch 1, but the hardware didn’t seem up to the task — and the team didn’t want to compromise by dropping the game to 30fps.

“When we were developing for the Nintendo Switch system, it was difficult for us to incorporate everything we wanted, so we were always conscious of what we were giving up in return. We discussed things like toning down the visuals, lowering the resolution, and we even considered dropping the frame rate to 30 fps in some cases. It was a tough situation.”

While figuring out what to do, they pivoted to working on the Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Booster Course Pass. Not long after, the Switch 2 started to come into view.

“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.”

So why Mario Kart World, and not Mario Kart 9? Well they explain the reasoning for that too.

If the idea had just been to add more courses, then I think we would’ve called it Mario Kart 9.

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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.

There’s an entire four parts of the interview up now, including more on the Cow and you can read them all here.