Nintendo has released a surprise 'Ask the Developer' series on Mario Kart World ahead of its launch next month. The chat with the dev team is full of interesting revelations about the game itself, but one note in particular caught our eye right from the jump: the reason why the game isn't called 'Mario Kart 9'.
According to the developers, it's all a matter of scope. "If the idea had just been to add more courses, then I think we would’ve called it Mario Kart 9," Mario Kart World producer Kosuke Yabuki explains, "But, that wasn't our approach this time. We wanted to take the series to the next level".
Apparently, the team's decision to move away from the standard numbering led to the 'Mario Kart World' title appearing on concept art "from the early stages of development," which can be traced right back to 2018 — yes, on Switch 1.
The conversation even includes an image of some of this early concept art, which you'll find below:
As you can see, the early art very closely resembles the world that Nintendo would end up settling on, with various different areas interconnected by long tracks. Yeah, 'Mario Kart 9' this ain't.
And there's even more concept art for us to take in! Okay, it might not be quite so focused on the 'Mario Kart World' title, but if you want to see what the expansive new setting looked like in a first draft, look no further:
Planning team lead Shintaro Jikumaru stated that the team had "pretty much perfected the formula of a Mario Kart game where each course is played separately" with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. He saw the 'World' format as interesting from a dev perspective but potentially upsetting for fans of the series, claiming "I felt that our first challenge was to figure out how to add new elements while still making it satisfying for those who've played previous Mario Kart games".