Nintendo has posted its Ask The Developer series for Mario Kart World, and it’s revealed a bunch of information about the game, including the fact that it was in development since 2017 for the original Nintendo Switch.
In 2020, the company decided to instead move development to Nintendo’s next console after acknowledging that it would need to cut features or drop the game from 60 FPS to run it on the original Nintendo Switch.
Interestingly enough, it then decided to do the Mario Kart 8 Expansion to prolong the life of that game and give the team more time to realise their full vision for the game
“When we were developing for Nintendo Switch, 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.” said Sato.
“We worked on it while kicking the can down the road in 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 the Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – Booster Course , we thought that would give us a bit more time to continue development. That’s when the conversation of moving it to Nintendo Switch 2 came up, and this suddenly opened up a bunch of possibilities on what we could do. It was truly a ray of hope. added Yabuki.
“Yabuki-san first brought it up around 2020. Back then, we already had an idea of the next console’s expected specs, but it wasn’t until a bit later that we actually received working development units. Until then, we just had to proceed with development based on provisional estimates.” added Sato.
Mario Kart World launches on June 5th alongside the Nintendo Switch 2. You can read our preview for the game HERE.
