Nintendo has discussed Mario Kart World's fan-favourite new character, Cow, and shown off the piece of concept art that secured her place in the game as a playable character.
Speaking as part of a fascinating Ask the Developer interview, the Mario Kart World development team revealed their "silly sketch" that convinced the game's development team to upgrade Cow from a background character to a fully-fledged part of the game's roster.
"In previous games in the series, Cow was part of the scenery or an obstacle on one of the courses," producer Kosuke Yabuki said. "But when we were working on an early version of a course in this game set on a ranch that players can drive through, this sketch came up."
The sketch, which shows a smiling Cow driving a truck and looking like she does not have a care in the world, was immediately seized upon as inspiration for Cow to become Mario Kart's next playable character — and led to other background NPCs becoming playable, too.
"Each new Mario Kart game features new characters to race with, but since we added so many to the previous game, we wondered where we could go from there," art director Masaaki Ishikawa continued.
"And then one of the designers came up with that silly sketch of Cow cruising along, and I thought to myself, 'This is it!' (Laughs) So that's when we realized the course surroundings actually contained a lot of untapped resources."
Cow's addition to the Mario Kart World roster was quickly followed by Cheep Cheep (the red fish Mario often has to dodge) and Pokey (the smiling, wiggling cactus character) also becoming playable.
"It was like, 'They're NPCs, but they're playable? Which is it?'" Yabuki continued. "It's pretty funny to see a four-legged Cow holding onto motorcycle handlebars with her front hooves."
"But when she jumps, she strikes a proper quadrupedal pose," Ishikawa added. "So I'm pretty sure Cow is still in touch with her animal nature. (Laughs)"
Elsewhere in the same interview, Yabuki confirmed that Nintendo had the name Mario Kart World in mind "from the early stages of development" when the game's open-world nature was already being worked on.
"If the idea had just been to add more courses, then I think we would've called it Mario Kart 9," Yabuki said. "But, that wasn't our approach this time. We wanted to take the series to the next level. So, we decided to drop the numbering this time and go with a completely new title."
Finally, the development team discussed Mario Kart World's addition of unlockable character costumes, found by snacking on food at Yoshi's drive-thru restaurants in different in-game regions.
Each region will unlock its own costumes, and offer its own food varieties. One example given is a Yoshi's drive-thru in a volcano region selling hot soup inspired by Bowser.
Originally, Nintendo says it hadn't linked its ideas for unlockable costumes and food together, with the former simply being planned to be purchasable from in-game shop locations. But stopping at these interrupted the game's open-world driving experience, developers said, and anyway — didn't Mario magically transform costumes already when he gobbled food up?
"The question came up: 'Does Mario, in fact, eat mushrooms?'," Yabuki laughed. The query prompted Mario Kart World's development team to hunt down Nintendo legend Takashi Tezuka, and get his verdict.
"Tezuka-san [answered], 'Yeah, he is'," Yabuki confirmed. And thus, Mario Kart World's costume-producing food was born.
Perhaps the biggest surprise to come out of the interview was the revelation that Mario Kart World began development on Nintendo Switch, before performance concerns led to the game being delayed for launch on Switch 2 instead.
Mario Kart World, and Cow, will arrive on Switch 2 on the console's launch day — June 5, 2025.
