Sure, Mario Kart World's free-roaming and knockout races are something, but do you remember back when you used to be able to squeeze two racers onto one kart? Now that was a hook.
That's exactly what Mario Kart: Double Dash!! brought to the table in 2003, the first and last time we would see the mechanic crop up in the series. However, the classic GameCube racer was almost a lot more singular, with Nintendo considering parking the dual-driver gameplay for something more in line with what players had seen before — the horror.
That's according to a 2003 Nintendo Dream interview, recently translated into English by Shmuplations. In it, developers Tadashi Sugiyama, Shinya Takahashi and Kiyoshi Mizuki stated that the two-driver mechanic was a way for the team to "innovate while not destroying what makes Mario Kart unique", but it was difficult to implement and potentially confusing to play.
Worried that the central hook could be offputting for some players, the devs confessed that they were also secretly making a single-driver version, just in case things went wrong. Sugiyama said the following:
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 veryyy 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.
Takahashi jokingly refers to this side project as the team's "emergency escape hatch" — a way out just in case they had to pivot away from the dual-driving at the 11th hour. Gosh, now that's some preparation.
Fortunately, as you'll know if you've ever played Double Dash!! (or done so much as to look at its cover art), the two-racers-per-kart hook made it across the finish line. "But in the end, owing I think to the majority of our staff who really wanted to do something new," Sugiyama continued, "we consolidated the development into just the two-driver concept". Phew.
Later in the interview, the developers shared that the team had initially conceived of the two-racer mechanic utilising a sidecar rather than one racer in the front and one in the back, but that brought up issues of its own. "Normally when one thinks of two people in a car, you think of a driver and passenger seat side-by-side," Sugiyama said, "But for Mario Kart, that would end up making the karts too wide. Can you imagine 8 massive karts lined up like that?"
The team later settled on the front and back approach and let you swap out the driver at any time so you always had the chance to see both characters. "We were able to do pretty much everything we imagined," Takahashi commented.
It's an interesting interview, and well worth a read in full if you're after some more info on the beloved racer. With GameCube coming to NSO on Switch 2, it's probably about time that we get our hands on it again. Right, Nintendo? Right??