Modern Nintendo fans have a wide array of Mario spin-off games at their fingertips, so it’s easy to assume that was the intent from the start for the eponymous racing series. However, the iconic franchise’s genesis—which arguably kicked off the plumber’s saga as a spin-off superstar—was a bit of a winding road. Originally, the game had nothing to do with Mario, or karts.
You’d be hard-pressed to find much criticism of the original F-Zero. If anything, players wanted more. Specifically, they wanted to play with friends. Nintendo was interested in exploring that feature, yet not necessarily for F-Zero itself. “I should point out that we didn’t set out to create a two-player version of F-Zero,” producer Shigeru Miyamoto clarified during a 2008 Iwata Asks segment discussing the history of the Mario Kart series. “We set out to make a game where we could display the game screen for two players at the same time.”
The concern with a multiplayer F-Zero was that the game’s signature high speeds would have to be sacrificed, and upon experimenting with the multiplayer prototype this proved to be true. According to the developers, F-Zero displays the layer for each course over an area equal to 100 game screens, which largely accounts for its immense speed and feeling of scale. Trying to layer in a split-screen feature on top of that proved too much for the hardware, ultimately requiring the game area to be no more than four screens wide by four screens high (84 fewer screens than F-Zero). With the limitation of a substantially smaller course, the dev team found it impossible to recreate the signature sense of speed achieved in their first racing game.
So what’s slightly slower than 26th century hovercrafts powered by experimental alien technology? The Super Mario Kart team eventually decided on go-karts, as they were a much better fit for the smaller courses. In the official Super Mario Kart strategy guide, Mr. Miyamoto recounted wanting to make “a fun, lighthearted game where you zip around unrealistically in cars. It wouldn’t be the life-or-death, dangerous world of F1 racing, but more the atmosphere of screeching wheels as you zip around an amusement park. From those ideas, the concept eventually evolved naturally from cars to karts.” It just so happened that go-karts were becoming quite popular in the early ’90s thanks to a number of high-profile Formula One racers who had begun their climb to motorsport stardom through karting. A very lucky coincidence for Nintendo.
