Mario Kart has long been a tentpole title for anyone who loves playing with friends on a Nintendo console. The series has always been about speed, fun, and creative chaos, offering fresh ways to challenge your friends with each new release. But Mario Kart World, the latest installment launching alongside the Nintendo Switch 2, marks a bold new direction. It introduces fresh ideas and showcases the strengths of Nintendo’s new hardware. This isn’t just another track pack or character update—it’s a full reinvention. A bigger game. A more ambitious vision. One that reimagines what a Mario Kart title can be in 2025.
Helping bring this new vision to life is longtime series producer Kosuke Yabuki. Having helped shape everything from Mario Kart 8 to ARMS, Yabuki-san understands how to surprise players while staying true to what makes Mario Kart iconic. With Mario Kart World, the team didn’t just aim to boost visual fidelity or introduce new race modes—they set out to create a living, breathing world that players could race through with friends across a massive map.
With the Nintendo Switch 2 just days away from launch, CGMagazine sat down with Yabuki-san to discuss how Mario Kart World evolved into a Nintendo Switch 2 launch title, how the new Knockout Tour mode flips online play on its head, and why sometimes the best way to move forward is by leaving even beloved features behind. This time, the race is more elaborate—and more exciting—than ever.
Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today. My question is about development and how Mario Kart World became one of the launch titles for the Nintendo Switch 2. With this system being significantly more powerful than the original Switch, how did that impact the team’s approach to the game’s presentation? And were there any new limitations or challenges you encountered as a result of developing for the new hardware?
Yabuki-san: Well, thank you for the question. First off, yes, you may have noticed in the interview in the Ask the Devs article on the Nintendo website, with Mario Kart World, we talked about the fact that development on this title actually began in 2017. And from the very beginning, what we did know was that we wanted to create a vast world, and that we wanted to have many players on screen, all playing at the same time.
“Mario Kart World, the latest installment launching alongside the Nintendo Switch 2, marks a bold new direction.”
We began the production thinking about all of the things that we wanted to do, but we were thinking about, at that time, in terms of the context of what we thought would be possible using the Switch One processing power at that time. And we were looking at maybe a different amount of what we thought we could do at that level.
So, I certainly had a lot of conversations with people when they would come up to me, and even just purely from the point of view of how many different things we were trying to create and put into this game. They would come up to me and say, Mr. Yabuki, “This is too much. I don’t think we can do all of this.” And I would say, “Well, let’s just put in everything that we want to make.”
But as we worked on all of those different ideas and brought them to life, certainly there came a moment where we could start to think about, “Okay, is this going to be a title that maybe we move to Nintendo Switch 2 and create it on that platform?” And as we kept going forward, that decision became finalized, and suddenly we realized that everything we wanted to do with this title, we could do on the Nintendo Switch 2, and we’re very excited. And really happy to see next week how everyone receives the game when it launches
So there’s an expression in Japanese that your hand is coming out of your throat because you’re so hungry. And I think that explains well how ravenous I was for any kind of information I could get about the Nintendo Switch 2’s processing power and capability early on.
“With Mario Kart World, the team didn’t just aim to boost visual fidelity or introduce new race modes—they set out to create a living, breathing world that players could race through with friends across a massive map.”
I wanted to touch on Knockout Tour, which seems to be a major part of the Mario Kart World experience. How did that mode come about during development, and at what point was the decision made to make it a core component of the game’s online offering?
Yabuki-san: Thank you for asking about Knockout Tour. I really like getting those questions. I’ve been working on the Mario Kart series for a long time, and I have to say that adding a new mode is always a big decision—one we have to approach very carefully. The reason for that is that you need to make sure that all of your players understand the rules when you introduce a new mode, and you have to be concerned about “Okay, have we divided our online player base by doing so? By adding this?”
But in the development of Mario Kart World, we were balancing this against the potential benefits of adding such a new mode. Because we have this vast world, we want to make the best use of it. We had prototyped this activity and thought about how fun it would be for people to travel all the way from one side of the continent to another, to experience the world that way.
Because this can be quite a long drive, if you’re talking about a ten-minute mode to get from one side of the continent to another, if some people are pretty low in the rankings and they feel like, “Oh, I’m not going to be winning this race,” they might start to lose a little bit of motivation. But this is an opportunity for us to do a kindness to them, so when they get cut at a checkpoint in this mode [Knockout Tour], this is an opportunity for them to get into another mode that they will enjoy.
So even though it might sound kind of simple, really the one rule someone has to remember about Knockout Tour is that there will be these cuts made at checkpoints to those who are the lowest in the rankings. That’s still something we spent a lot of time thinking about—how can we explain this and make sure it’s understood by everyone?
But I was really happy to see, when I attended the [Nintendo] Experience events, that some of the best reactions we got from players and in the crowds were exactly at those checkpoints where people were getting cut. So people were making an event out of it and enjoying it.
And then, as to your question about when in the development period we started to think about and include the Knockout Tour mode, this was actually pretty early on in development, where we had it prototyped out.
To wrap things up—since Mario Kart World is the first new entry in the series in some time—is there anything in the game you’re especially excited to see fans react to? And on a personal note, is there a favourite feature or addition that made it into the final release that you’re particularly proud of?
Yabuki-san: That’s a really hard question. It’s tough to pick your favorite in terms of, like, “What is the best new element of Mario Kart World?” But I should say upfront that, as a creator, you never really feel like something you used in a previous iteration, but are not using now, is necessarily bad.
So, for example, you brought up customization of karts earlier. That’s not something we’re not using now because we think it’s a bad idea. We’re just going in a different direction.
In terms of thinking about it—even from a design perspective, not necessarily fan expectations—if you were to carry all previous elements forward every time, you would start to lose the ability to balance the game as a whole. Another thing we have to think about is: how can we surprise players with new elements?
And so, because we’re always aiming to surprise our players and really give them this feeling of, like, “Oh, that looks fun. I’m familiar with Mario Kart, but this new one has some really interesting new elements,” to pull them in—that was our opportunity to say, “Okay, we really will start from the ground level and reconsider all of these elements in addition to new ones,” and then choose very deliberately how they come together to create a very good combo. A lot of thought goes into that.
If we’re talking about it, maybe from a technical perspective, the very first thing we have to consider in creating a game like Mario Kart World, with this vast, interconnected world, is how we’re using data to create that world, like, what are our opportunities to do so?
And so, in creating this new world, you want it to come to life. And for it to do so, you really have to consider how you’re changing some specs or maybe keeping some elements you’ve seen before. It has to be a very careful balance of what is familiar—what draws players in and makes them feel comfortable—and what is a surprise, what is the new element, and how those are balanced together.
And some of our considerations are from quite a different angle. For example, Mario Kart as a series is not a game people usually play alone; rather, they’re often playing with friends and family. So we have to consider: what is the experience? How quickly can we get them into a race and playing? How can we make that smooth and easy?
So next week, when the game releases, I think a lot of players will see this. When you start, the first menu that comes up shows single player, multiplayer, and online—and it should feel really familiar. It should be very close to what you’d see in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.
We want to get people through that early experience quickly—in terms of choosing the number of players, the characters—and then getting them into the race. That’s something I would put forward as one of those elements that doesn’t necessarily change. We want that to be a familiar, smooth, and easy experience, just like in previous titles.
Mario Kart World and the Nintendo Switch 2 will be available June 5, 2025.
