Mario Kart World Began Development on Switch 1 and Suffered Performance Struggles, Until Switch 2 Delay Offered ‘Ray of Hope’

Switch 2 launch title Mario Kart World was originally in development more than five years ago, solely for the original Nintendo Switch.

However, Nintendo has said its development team struggled to get Mario Kart World’s 24-player concept working on its aging Switch 1 hardware — to the point where it was faced with making major technological compromises.

In the end, these compromises were abandoned in favour of a new approach. As early as 2020, Mario Kart World’s developers say they had a rough idea of Nintendo’s Switch 2 tech specs — and so began discussing a delay for the project onto Nintendo’s next-gen machine.

Speaking as part of a revealing Ask the Developer interview, Nintendo’s Mario Kart World team said they had approached the concept of incorporating open-world gameplay and 24-player multiplayer “from a calm and collected programming perspective” to see whether it would be possible.

However, the team soon decided it would not.

“It was difficult for us to incorporate everything we wanted, so we were always conscious of what we were giving up in return,” said Mario Kart World programming director Kenta Sato.

“We discussed things like toning down the visuals, lowering the resolution, and we even considered dropping the framerate to 30 fps in some cases. It was a tough situation.”

While confident in the concept, Mario Kart World’s team continued attempting to make it work, but felt they were “kicking the can down the road,” according to producer Kosuke Yabuki.

“We knew it was going to get messy,” Yabuki continued. “But as we’d decided to release Mario Kart 8 Deluxe’s Booster Course Pass, we thought that would give us a bit more time to continue development.

“That’s when the conversation of moving it to the Nintendo Switch 2 system came up, and this suddenly opened up a bunch of possibilities on what we could do. It was truly a ray of hope.”

This was “around 2020,” the interview reveals, when Nintendo developers had “an idea of the next system [Switch 2]’s expected specs” but before working development units were available. So, the Mario Kart World team continued on, using estimates of the Switch 2 power they’d be able to play with.

“If we had included everything we wanted to in this game’s vast world, then it wouldn’t have run at 60 fps and would have suffered from constant framerate drops,” Sato said. “I think there were a lot of people on the team who were worried about whether we could really manage it.

“But once we decided to release this game on Switch 2, we expected our worries to evaporate all at once,” he continued. “I remember being overjoyed when I discovered we could express even more than we’d originally set out to.”

Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social‬