The lower your rank, the better the item you might get, and racers up in front would get more standard, defensive items. It’s hard to believe, but the first Mario Kart game also had items.Īpart from balancing races, items were introduced due to the popularity of Pachinko and similar arcade games. You can in more recent Mario Kart games, it’s super calming but if you slip behind the pack, it’s near on impossible to catch-up. The SNES classic also gave birth to items. After research, they opted for a simple hop and holding down the shoulder buttons instead! Konno noted how the team tried to implement specific drift controls, but the majority couldn’t quite do it. It also came from Konno watching videos on classic street drifting – where cars would take on corners whilst slamming on the breaks and counter-steering, risking rolling off a mountain if done wrong. Who created the power slide in Mario Kart?Īs well as pioneering mascot racers, Nintendo also pioneered the “power slide” or drift mechanic, wanting you to feel excited as you zip around a track, instead of over-realistic racing.

It was that concept that made the team opt for karts instead of Formula 1 cars. The project’s director Hideki Konno went hard on the research, reading books on kart racing and the team even went to a local amusement park for a day of go-kart racing. The team had their characters now, but why karts instead of cars or even the bikes of Excite Bike? Instead of dropping Mario into Formula 1 cars, the team wanted something a little bit more fun, cartoony, and frantic. The Origin of Mario Kart? An Amusement Park Who knows, maybe the designer who drew the overalls on the earlier guy intended that it be changed to Mario all along!” The most impressive part was seeing your fellow racer drift past you, that sense of sharing the same space and really selling that two-player concept.Īccording to Shigeru Miyamoto in an Iwata Asks interview, “We decided to see what it would look like with Mario in one of the karts, and everyone thought that looked even better. Mario Kart was created by a team that developed a prototype where carts could move around freely around a track. Each racer having different colour palettes and the same base driver sprite. As seen from sprites on The Cutting Room Floor, it looked a little generic. Interesting, but not exactly exciting enough to fly off the shelves like F-Zero.

The initial concept didn’t even feature Mario, but it instead had characters racing overalls sitting on a track. It would allow for two friends or enemies to battle for that first place crown! F-Zero was a single player experience, so the main goal was to add multiplayer. With that in mind, Nintendo went off to brew another racing game powered by Mode 7. The Need for Multiplayer in the Origin of Mario Kart

Super mario kart sprite