As we’ve noted many times on this site, one of the most important things for developers and publishers to do with long-standing franchises is occasionally “spice them up” so that they don’t play exactly like those that have come before. We’ve seen many successful and unsuccessful attempts at this over the years, including from companies like Nintendo. During the GameCube era, many feel The Big N did their best “pivot” with mechanics via the game Mario Kart Double Dash, which changed things up by having not one but TWO drivers that you could switch to so you could have fun while taking out opponents.
It was such a unique mechanic that they’d never done it again. Yet, in a newly found and translated interview with producer Shinya Takahashi, it appears that it almost never happened in the first place. That’s apparently because Nintendo was prepared for single-driver mechanics if they couldn’t get the tandem style to work properly:
“Since Mario Kart has always been more of a party game, our point-of-departure for the development was thinking about what new multiplayer gameplay mechanics we could add, and specifically what new mechanics we could add if the karts had two drivers. Another issue for us was how to innovate while not destroying what makes Mario Kart unique. That was a monumental challenge.”
You can understand their concern on that front, as this was one of their bedrock franchises that many things have built off from. If they made a bad entry because they ‘went too far,’ fans would never let them hear the end of it.
To that end, producer Tadashi Sugiyama had this to add:
“Yeah, so you’ve got all these expectations, and you’ve got to add something new. The ‘two drivers’ concept, therefore, was something we came to at the end of a very long process of brainstorming. We were a little worried about it though, so at first we were developing a single-driver version too, in parallel with the two-driver development.”
Dubbed their “emergency escape hatch,” the team had to work hard to overcome the challenges within, including ones you wouldn’t expect. For example, at one point, the karts themselves were “too wide” because of how they had the drivers in them. That’s when the swap mechanic came into play.
The Nintendo team was focused and wanted to make this work, and it clearly did. Now, all eyes are on the newest entry, which will kick off the Nintendo Switch 2’s lifetime on June 5th.
