Mario Kart World looks like a big step in the evolution of the racing series. This upcoming Nintendo Switch 2 game has an open world, drive-thrus, and costumes for the drivers. What you might not know, though, is that during development, developers had to dig deep into the lore to answer the real questions, like whether Mario does indeed eat mushrooms.
In a new Ask the Developers blog post, graphic artist Masaaki Ishikawa says: "The designers came up with various ideas, thinking that if the theme was a vast world, they could show things other than racing."
One of these other things was eating food, which, according to Mario Kart producer Kosuke Yabuki, came up "early in development."
Shintaro Jikumaru, a planner, adds: "If you're travelling through a vast and diverse world, you can’t leave out the local food that's unique to each place." It's a lot of work, though. "We did consider removing the food feature at one point," Jikumaru says. "Incorporating it into the game means adding not only the food itself, but also the stores that sell it and the staff that work there, which would mean even more content."
This has led to the inclusion of Yoshi's, a chain of drive-thrus. "A Yoshi's drive-thru located in a volcanic region would look like a volcano and sell piping-hot soup inspired by Bowser," laughs Ishikawa.
The costumes came about as a result of the food. "As we were making these various concepts, Yabuki-san comes marching up to me and says, 'When Mario eats something, he transforms,'" remembers Jikumaru. "He sounded pretty serious about it."
So, rather than adding more shops and buildings, the devs decided to make it so that the different foods you could eat would unlock new outfits. But this also led to some questions that even the Nintendo staff didn't know the answer to.
Yabuki says, "Then, the question came up: 'Does Mario, in fact, eat mushrooms?'" Jikumaru adds, "in the midst of development, we went up to [Takashi] Tezuka-san [a producer on the 2D Mario games,] and asked him to confirm, 'Is Mario actually eating those mushrooms?'"
Tezuka confirmed that yes, Mario does, in fact, eat the mushrooms. So, when the Switch 2 comes out June 5 and you're exploring, eating, and getting new costumes, think about all the effort and research that went into adding the feature.
In the meantime, check out all of the other Switch 2 launch games you'll be able to play in a couple of weeks.
