Mario Kart: Double Dash - 2003 Developer Interview

This lengthy Mario Kart: Double Dash interview with Tadashi Sugiyama, Shinya Takahashi and Kiyoshi Mizuki originally appeared in Nintendo Dream magazine. Like most Nintendo Dream interviews, the mood here is light-hearted and slightly promotional, but there is still a wealth of design insight and serious discussion to be found. Look for part 2 next month!

Tadashi Sugiyama – Producer
Shinya Takahashi – Producer
Kiyoshi Mizuki – Chief Director

—This is your first interview with Nintendo Dream, so please give a brief introduction and tell us what games you've worked on.

Sugiyama: Oh, I'm pretty old… the list would be long…

—You've been around awhile. (laughs) I was looking over the list of your works you sent us before this interview and I was surprised.

Sugiyama: I've been involved in all the Mario Kart developments all the way back to the Super Famicom.

—That's right. I think we can safely say that yours has been "a Mario Kart Life." (laughs)

Sugiyama: (laughs)

—You also worked as the character designer for Ice Climbers (1985) and were the director of Zelda II (1987)... was Ice Climbers your very first game, then?

Sugiyama: No, I worked on a lot of the very first Famicom games. I joined Nintendo the same year as Yoshio Sakamoto.

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—Sakamoto of Metroid fame... I see, you're peers. You haven't appeared in the media much though. It's impressive how well you've managed to hide yourself up to now! (laughs)

Sugiyama: What can I say. (laughs)

—Takahashi, you served as a producer on Double Dash alongside Sugiyama. Can you tell us your history?

Takahashi: I believe Yuuyuuki (1989) for the Famicom was my first game. (laughs)

—You also participated in the Wild Tracks (1994) and Ocarina of Time (1998) developments.

Takahashi: Actually, I've contributed to most of Nintendo EAD's recent developments, in one shape or another. It just so happened that for Double Dash, my role was a bit larger.

—I see. You and Takahashi were both originally designers.

Sugiyama: Yeah. I first joined Nintendo as a designer.

—And last but not least, Mizuki, you were Chief Director on Double Dash. We don't know anything about you or what games you've made... a real man of mystery! (laughs)

Everyone: (laughs)

—Were you working at another company before joining Nintendo?

Mizuki: Yeah. My first work after joining Nintendo was Mario Story (N64, 2000). I drew the pixel art for Princess Peach, and helped out on other graphical tasks too.

—So it's been about three years since you joined Nintendo?

Mizuki: No, this is my fifth year actually. After Mario Story, I supervised the development of the mini-games for Pokemon Stadium Silver. On that project I worked under Takahashi. Then, on Luigi's Mansion (2002), I was an Assistant Director working under Sugiyama.

—Great. Moving on to Double Dash... what a wonderful title that is, "Double Dash."

Takahashi: Since Mario Kart has always been more of a party game, our point-of-departure for the development was thinking about what new multiplayer gameplay mechanics we could add, and specifically what new mechanics we could add if the karts had two drivers.

—I see.

Takahashi: Another issue for us was how to innovate while not destroying what makes Mario Kart unique. That was a monumental challenge. (laughs)

Sugiyama: Yeah, Mario Kart has turned into a flagship title for Nintendo, and each console has to have its own Mario Kart game. Well, of course it's going to sell big, it's Mario Kart!—that pressure is huge.

—And there's the pressure from players as well. It's Mario Kart, we expect it to be fun. (laughs)

Sugiyama: 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: Our emergency escape hatch. (laughs)

Everyone: (laughs)

Sugiyama: But in the end, owing I think to the majority of our staff who really wanted to do something new, we consolidated the development into just the two-driver concept.

—You say "two drivers" so casually, but it sounds like a very challenging idea to implement...?

Mizuki: Indeed. Nearly all of last year was devoted to working out the two-driver mechanics.

—Lots of experimentation?

Mizuki: Yeah. We tried all sorts of stuff.

—Can you give an example?

Mizuki: Hmmm… how much am I allowed to divulge here?

Takahashi: Ah, that's a bit sensitive. (laughs)

—I mean, the game is about to be released, so no harm in talking about it now, right?! (laughs)

Takahashi: Our very first idea was to have sidecars.

—Ah, I see! Like little cars attached on the side.

Sugiyama: Normally when one thinks of two people in a car, you think of a driver and passenger seat side-by-side. But for Mario Kart, that would end up making the karts too wide. Can you imagine 8 massive karts lined up like that? (laughs)

Takahashi: We messed around with the positioning a lot, and ultimately settled on having them ride behind you.

Sugiyama: Unfortunately that led to another problem. "I can't see the driver in front!" Our solution to that was to let you swap the drivers at any time.

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—I seeeee. (laughs) So that's how the character change mechanic came about. Given all the animation this must have entailed, I get the impression the Game Cube hardware is being put through the paces...

Mizuki: It's using the Game Cube CPU to nearly full capacity. The 16 characters are all fully modeled, with the same number of joints that you'd find in any modern game. It's definitely not at the level of a normal racing game.

Takahashi: Fully animating all the characters was one of our development premises. No matter what, I didn't want to yield on that. There's also trees swaying in the wind, and lots of other moving elements in the courses.

—I went back and played Mario Kart 64 and it was like controlling robots... much stiffer.

Sugiyama: All the stuff we couldn't do on MK64, we wanted to realize here on the Game Cube. For example, the MK64 characters are all done with pre-rendering, and thus are essentially drawn as one polygon. With the Game Cube we've managed to have proper full-polygon characters, as well as more realistic movement for the karts. On the N64, your kart's movement is centered around one point (the middle of the character), but the Game Cube actually calculates each tire when determining the movement. Having four points like that made the movement much more realistic.

—I definitely feel that. One of the fun things about Mario Kart is the feeling that there's a battle raging all around the track, outside of what you individually see while racing. It's great that there's a replay mode now, so you can go review all the action afterwards.

Sugiyama: That was something we wanted to do on the N64, but weren't able to. We didn't have many images of the karts from the front side…

Takahashi: That's also why there's not a lot of jumps in MK64. We weren't able to prepare pre-renders of the karts from very many angles.

—Ah, I see! (laughs)

Sugiyama: And that's why the N64 courses don't have a lot of verticality to them, either.

—Ahhh. But now, with full polygon models, that limitation doesn't apply.

Sugiyama: Yeah, that was one of the advantages.

Takahashi: I think with Double Dash, we were able to do pretty much everything we imagined, right?

Mizuki: Yes, though there were a lot of things we removed because we felt they were too stressful once we tried them out.

Sugiyama: Yeah, things that didn't feel like they fit Mario Kart.

—For example?

Mizuki: Um, I don't know if I can go into it… (laughs)

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—In Double Dash, your abilities change based on the kart you chose, not the character. Why did you make it that way?

Mizuki: At first, we had it so the difference in weight between your two characters determined how the kart handled, and we also tried a system where switching characters mid-race would also switch your handling. We toyed with every permutation of these ideas, really. But when we actually tried it out, it was kind of confusing to have the kart's handling change mid-race like that, especially when the change was minor. On the other hand, having the karts change dramatically (where the player would definitely notice) was too jarring and made it hard to play. In the end, having the karts themselves determine the handling and abilities was the easiest to understand on a visual level. We had designed a lot of different karts too, so it worked out.

—There is a ton of variety in the karts... but there's some that hardly qualify as "karts." (laughs)

Everyone: (laughs)

Takahashi: There was a lot of debate about that amongst the staff, too. (laughs)

—Wario and Waluigi's American sports car, that's no kart. (laughs)

Takahashi: No way, it's got wheels and a boxy frame… so it's a kart too!

Everyone: (laughs)

—I see. (laughs) I also noticed that Double Dash is being released worldwide at almost the same time as the domestic Japan release date.

Takahashi: Yeah. That's a first for us, and something groundbreaking in its own right.

—I see you're proud of that. (laughs)

Takahashi: Yup. (laughs) It might be the first Nintendo game to have a properly localized version ready-to-go at release.

—I think you've released games in Japan and America simultaneously before, but to have five different languages available like this, for the European market, that's impressive.

Takahashi: They told us they wanted it ready for all the people celebrating Christmas around the world.

Everyone: (laughs)

Takahashi: Mario Kart games don't have a lot of text to translate, so it made sense.

Mizuki: There's a lot of people playing Mario Kart in Europe. So when Nintendo said "We want this by the end of the year. You won't regret the effort, we promise!", well, we couldn't refuse. (laughs)

Takahashi: At the end of the development, we had Americans, Italians, French, and German players come test it. It was like an international summit. (laughs)

Everyone: (laughs)

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—There's so much variety in the courses in Double Dash. What went into these designs?

Sugiyama: I touched on this a moment ago, but we wanted the courses to have more terrain variety, which we couldn't do on the N64.

—I love the course where you're fired out of a cannon, and slide down the mountain.

Takahashi: That was a touchstone course for us, it sort of kickstarted everything else.

Mizuki: Yeah, we started the course designs by seeing just how extreme we could get with the variety in the terrain.

—Didn't such complex terrain make the camera positioning troublesome?

Takahashi: Yeah—but that is why we started with that course, to iron everything out.

—I see. (laughs) You wanted to challenge yourself by designing the most difficult course first, in other words.

Mizuki: Actually, the first course we started designing was Mario Circuit, but when we tried it out, it was like, "This is fun, but there's something too ordinary about it." So we then decided to work on something more adventurous, and started designing that mountain course. Ironically, after working on something as complex as the mountain course, we started to think, "hmm, maybe we do want to have a simple course suitable for time trials…"

—Like the Baby Park course. It's extremely simple, but so much fun.

Takahashi: We knew fairly early on that we wanted to make a course like that.

Mizuki: We were designing the courses right at the time the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics were underway. I saw the short track they'd prepared for the ice skating and thought, "we should make a track like that!"

Sugiyama: Do you remember the "slick kart" attractions they used to have? They were only popular for a brief time, but you'd race your kart around a short, very slick indoor track. That was our image for Baby Park.

Mizuki: We made a quick little test track and tried it out, and it was really fun, so we used it as-is. The idea was a simple course where everyone can use their items aggressively.

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—It's one of those courses where the tables are constantly turning. It's crazy seeing all the koopa shells flying around in such a confined space. (laughs)

Mizuki: There's players who don't like it too. It's a love-it-or-hate-it kind of course.

—I do feel like there are less mean-spirited, or "cruel" courses in Double Dash.

Mizuki: That was intentional.

—The Ghost House course in Mario Kart 64 was one of those. I remember so many times wanting to scream out, "ARGH! Who put this hole in the middle of the track?!" (laughs)

Sugiyama: Who was it that made that course again…? (the three look at each other nervously) Oh wait… it might have been me. (laughs)

Everyone: (laughs)

—Hah, so you're the one who made me suffer! (laughs) But seriously, the courses in Double Dash are really spectacular.

Sugiyama: The designers all worked very hard to refine them.

—There aren't too many sharp curves where you're forced to bang up against the wall... the turns all feel very smooth.

Takahashi: Yeah, we fine-tuned the drifting in accordance with the track design. So if we changed some parameters on the drifting, we went and made sure the courses lined up with that, and vice-versa. That was a process we repeated many times over.

—Yeah, it makes the tracks feel seamless and just a joy to drive.

Takahashi: That really was one of our biggest priorities in Double Dash.

Mizuki: We wanted this to be a game that even beginners could enjoy, so we gathered together the families and children of the employees at Nintendo and had them play what we had in-development. For the developers too, if any of us felt uncertain about a section, like it didn't feel quite right, as much as we could we tried to correct those areas.

—I see. In Mario Kart 64, if you strayed from the course even a little it really slowed you down, and made the whole experience much more stressful. I feel like there's very few moments like that in Double Dash.

Sugiyama: Naturally there were a lot of problem sections like that during the development. But we took the time to iron them out, and ultimately were able to remove them.

—There's dash panels on the outer corner banks of Luigi's Circuit... are you supposed to use them?

Sugiyama: If you're aiming for a record in Time Trial mode, you'll want to stick to the inside track.

—Dash panels are supposed to make you go faster, so I thought that way would be quicker... but then I saw everyone pass me up, and it was like, "they tricked me!" (laughs)

Sugiyama: I took the bait too. (laughs)

Mizuki: For beginners I think using those dash panels is faster, though. And it feels great too.

—There's a side road in Luigi's Circuit too.

Sugiyama: That's for the Time Trials too. For experienced players, it's faster.

Takahashi: In the beginning of the development, yeah, it was faster to go that way.

Mizuki: We added side paths like that because we think once you've played the course a few times, it's more fun when there are alternative routes to take. So the course designers added a lot. Luigi's Circuit was the first course we made, too. If I recall, the 50cc version of that course is a little different?

—Really? How so?

Sugiyama: There's a guardrail in place between the lanes.

—Ah, to prevent head-on collisions.

Mizuki: There's also no side path. When people play for the first time, we don't want them to get lost. With the head-to-head lanes, that course can be a little confusing.

—There's a spot early on in Peach Beach where you enter a pipe on the left and it sends you flying. And yet it doesn't seem like a shortcut.

Mizuki: Yeah. Obviously it wouldn't be very fun if you could get the fastest time just by getting launched from a pipe. Our staff asked about that part a lot actually. "What's this path for…?" (laughs)

Takahashi: Yeah, they observed that "There's all these side paths on the maps, but they don't seem to be any faster than the main route…?"

Everyone: (laughs)

—There's a ramp platform in Peach Beach, and it seems like it would be faster, but it's surprisingly a lot slower... (laughs)

Mizuki: On that spot, it can be faster if the tide happens to be out. But generally speaking, the fastest route is usually the one that's straight ahead.

—Also, is it just my imagination, or did the mini-turbos get faster compared to Mario Kart 64?

Sugiyama: Did they?

Mizuki: It probably depends on the character. If you choose a lightweight vehicle they're very effective. They may not feel that way, but technically they should be faster. It was difficult to execute the mini-turbos in Mario Kart 64, so when you succeeded it was like, "I did it!!" Many on the staff thought it would feel incomplete to remove them for Double Dash, so they're there, but we tried to include them in such a way that it wouldn't create too big a divide between beginners and experienced players.

—Are there any techniques, then, for going fast?

Sugiyama: I'm very bad at Mario Kart so I can't answer that. (laughs) Should I call up some of the good players at Nintendo and have them tell us…? (laughs)

Everyone: (laughs)

Mizuki: Well, these tips won't satisfy players who already good, but for beginners, be sure to use your mini-turbo boosts as much as possible, and keep to the inside track when you can.

Takahashi: You want to shorten the distance you're driving, and aim for the shortest path between two points.

Mizuki: Also, this is obvious, but you want to find the shortest route for each course. There's a lot of side paths in Double Dash. Dry Dry Desert, in particular, your time will depend on finding which branching paths are quickest. It's very impressive to see what good players can pull off though. We had some Time Trial competitions between the development team and the debugging team, and on almost every track the debugging team whooped us.

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—The item boxes replenish at a faster rate now, don't they?

Mizuki: Yeah, they're fast now. We wanted to address the issue of players not getting items because someone right in front of them got it first. The staff had strong feelings about it. "Why is it that only the leading player gets any items?!" (laughs)

Sugiyama: We heard that a lot.

Mizuki: We sure did. (laughs) As a result we gradually raised the refresh speed more and more. (laughs) There are some courses with very few chances to get items, so it was very helpful there as well.

—The recovery time from spinning out from bananas and the like has also gotten faster, I feel.

Sugiyama: It's faster in Double Dash, yeah.

Mizuki: That was done for beginner players. Bananas are mostly used by players who are in the lead, which puts the players behind at a disadvantage. If they spin out for a long time, that just puts them even farther back, and the better players get hopelessly ahead…

—In Mario Kart 64, if you pressed the B button at the same time as you hit a banana, you could avoid spinning out...

Mizuki: Only skilled players could perform that B button escape, which again widened the gap between beginners and advanced players, so we didn't include that mechanic this time. There is a special item though, a giant banana, that makes you spin out more than normal.

—Oh, really?

Mizuki: To close the lead between first and last, other race games will often adjust the speed of the players directly. But we don't do anything like that in Double Dash.

—Instead, you adjust the item appearance rate, so players in the lead only get bananas. That big banana is awesome though. (laughs)

Sugiyama: Originally it was just a normal banana that we enlarged. (laughs)

Mizuki: Yeah, it's true. We were making adjustments to the regular banana to find the best size, and randomly the designer put the max value in the editor and suddenly there was this huge whopping banana there. (laughs) But it was funny, so we added it.

Mizuki: We did the same thing with Koopa's big shell, too. (laughs)

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—An accidental discovery! (laughs) All the special attacks are very strong this time. The Chain Chomp though... that one is annoying. (laughs)

Everyone: (laughs)

—When I hear the Chain Chomp approaching I find myself unconsciously moving my kart to the side of the road. You can hear the sound like bowling pins being knocked over... (laughs)

Sugiyama: That was the staff's favorite special attack too.

Mizuki: We had talked about adding the Chain Chomp back in Mario Kart 64, but it was only here in Double Dash that we got around to trying it out. From the moment we added it, even before fine-tuning it, everyone loved that one. We experimented a lot with the special attacks.

—In what ways?

Mizuki: Well, take the fireball. At first it was just one fireball, but that simply didn't feel strong. We tried making it explode, we tried lots of things but it just didn't feel strong. (laughs)

—How did you get it to its current form?

Mizuki: We had been experimenting with the shell special, and at one point we tried this starburst attack where five shells fly out in every direction… but it put too many shells on screen. But we took that idea and used it for the fireball special instead. Peach and Daisy's heart special was another tough one to make, by the way.

—It fits their characters perfectly though.

Mizuki: It was a very difficult birth. When we showed Double Dash at E3, they used a different special item. We thought it fit another character better so we moved it, but that left Peach and Daisy needing something. We were thinking about using their umbrellas at one point.

—Umbrellas? (laughs) How would that have worked?

Mizuki: It would have been used for defense, or to float you up into the air. (laughs)

Takahashi: Yeah, but descending so slowly would have slowed you down. (laughs)

Everyone: (laughs)

—The Spiny Shell is another incredible power up.

Mizuki: Since good players can end up getting so far ahead, we needed an item like the Spiny Shell. By the way, the reason it has wings is that originally it was supposed to be Koopa Paratroopa's special item, called "Winged Shell." We instead used it as-is for the Spiny Shell item, and because it felt too weak if it just hit players, we decided to make it explode. (laughs)

—I also love how your character does that happy pose when one of your items hits another player.

Mizuki: The designer created a lot of nice animations for that. In Mario Kart 64, your character would say something, but now there's a pose too.

—It's great in situations when you laid a banana somewhere awhile back and forgot about it.

Mizuki: Yeah. Someone somewhere has hit your banana… (laughs)

—It contributes to the sense that there's all this drama happening everywhere on the track, outside of what you're directly seeing.

Sugiyama: It was quite a challenge to balance all these different items though. The balance in the Mario Kart games, after all, essentially comes down to the items. And that was made even more challenging in Double Dash, where your other character can stockpile items…

Mizuki: There was a point in the development where we had so many items, it just completely destroyed the balance. (laughs) The players had no idea what was going on too. Originally, Koopa Troopa's special, the Triple Green Shell, those were normal items. But once everyone could use them it just turned all the courses into a topsy-turvy chaotic mess… (laughs)

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—I can picture it. (laughs) By the way, I noticed that it's possible to evade the red shell this time...

Mizuki: Yeah, it is possible.

—Was that added intentionally? I remember you could avoid them by trailing an item behind you in Mario Kart 64...

Sugiyama: You could mini-jump over them too. But there's no mini-jump in Double Dash.

Mizuki: The mechanic where you throw bananas and shells backwards was something we added as a way to address red shells, but the ability to dodge them while drifting, that wasn't something we intended. It sort of just happened without any instructions from above, and we ended up leaving it in.

—That was the right choice. (laughs) It feels awesome to evade a red shell by drifting.

Mizuki: Yeah. Plus, in Mario Kart 64, computer-controlled players didn't fire red shells.

—What? Really?

Mizuki: Yeah. Hardly anyone noticed that. For Double Dash, enemies throw red shells, but only in 150cc. Since there's a technique now to dodge them we felt comfortable adding that.

—The Mario Family has gained another member with the addition of Baby Luigi.

Takahashi: Well, we needed 16 characters. (laughs)

—Diddy appears in Mario Golf: Family Tour as well.

Takahashi: Yeah, it was being made at the same time as Double Dash.

—Did both games originally share the same character models, then?

Takahashi: Yes, the original models were the same. But we revised them according to the needs of each game.

—Speaking of character models, in Mario Kart 64, a lot of players noted that Yoshi's tail seems like it must get in the way of where he's sitting...

Sugiyama: Ah, yeah. I remember. (laughs)

—I've heard that you ultimately made it look like his tail was bent to the side, but one plan was to make it come out of the exhaust pipe. (laughs) Did you face any similar challenges with Double Dash?

Sugiyama: Yes, too many to count. (laughs)

Takahashi: We had this issue when a smaller and larger character were riding on the same kart, and the larger character—like Bowser, for instance—his limbs would stick out of the smaller rear kart. (laughs)

Sugiyama: We also ended up adding a second, smaller bar on the kart for those rear characters to hold onto. If you look carefully you can see it there. It was a clumsy solution, but the little guys just couldn't reach the higher bar. (laughs)

—Thank you for thinking about the little people. (laughs) It's so cute when Bowser Jr. is riding in the rear. He must be holding on for dear life!

Sugiyama: When Bowser Jr. is driving, if you look closely, you can see he's standing up there.

Takahashi: Actually, in the beginning of the development, you weren't able to freely choose your driving partner.

Mizuki: Yeah, it was pre-set combos, like Mario and Luigi.

Takahashi: But we knew it would be more fun to freely mix-and-match.

Mizuki: It caused the designers and the programmers a lot of grief though. (laughs) But it's way more fun this way.

—Who do you think is the strongest combination?

Mizuki: According to the Mario club, one of the baby characters and one of the Peach characters make the strongest duo. The babies' Chain Chomp attack is great for catching up, and if you're in the lead, you can rely on Peach's heart special… though it won't block every attack. In the beginning, the heart could block even the Chain Chomp. That was way too strong though so we changed it. (laughs)

—Why did you give the baby characters such a strong special item with the Chain Chomp, by the way?

Mizuki: Little kids usually like the cute characters, right? So we thought we would give the baby characters a strong special item that would be easy for beginners to use.

—I also noticed in Double Dash that colliding with the wall doesn't feel as punishing.

Mizuki: It's the same idea we had in Kirby's Air Ride, to not penalize players too much for hitting the wall. It doesn't lower your speed to much.

Takahashi: Yeah, we tried to make that feel a little better.

—Which items are you most proud of?

Mizuki: In the sense of being the most "Mario Kart" of them, I think the Spiny Shell. It's also an item that the whole team thought of, not just one person.

—So what are some subtle things about Double Dash that you think players may not notice?

Mizuki: The sound effects, for one. If you listen closely, the sounds of the engine and horns are subtly different for each character. Though I'm not sure if they're different enough to be able to distinguish who's coming up behind you by the sound alone. (laughs)

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—In an interview way back in the Super Famicom days, Miyamoto said "Our development concept is that if the single player mode is fun, it will be fun for two players, too." Does that hold true for Double Dash?

Mizuki: Yeah. The directors and programmers did a great job fine-tuning the computer-controller karts. I said directors—we had different directors for every section of the development. My job was to tie it all together.

—How many people were on the Double Dash development?

Mizuki: By the final phase, we ended up with about 40-50 people. The main staff was only about half that though.

—Wow, that's less than I thought!

Mizuki: It was even fewer for the whole of last year. That is normal for Nintendo game development though. I wouldn't call it particularly small. Over half of the staff joined the team this year.

—Wow. I get the impression the development went very smoothly...

Mizuki: I suppose you could say that…

—Oh? It wasn't? (laughs)

Takahashi: There were things we wanted to do, and we had to meet that international Christmas deadline, so… (laughs)

—I see. (laughs) How do you want people to experience Double Dash, by the way?

Sugiyama: The networked multiplayer is intense. The LAN setup is a bit difficult so there's probably not many people who will be able to take advantage of it, but it's incredibly fun. If you have the chance, you've got to try that mode out at least once.

Takahashi: I recommend parents and children play co-op together, with the parent driving and the child controlling the items.

—Ah, that would be fun. Even young kids who aren't old enough to play games yet, if all they have to do is throw items then they can participate. I can hear it now: "Mama, hurry up and get another item!" (laughs)

Mizuki: During the playtesting, we had young kids who were otherwise totally unable to play games on their own. We had them play co-op with the parents just as you described, and they loved it. We worried a lot about how to tie the co-op play together, though. The rear player spends a lot of time doing nothing…

Takahashi: For those who are used to playing games, yeah, there's a lot of downtime. But for very small children to play with their parents, it's perfect.

Mizuki: At first, we thought about forcing the players to switch positions after each lap. But that would have ruined that parent-child playstyle.

—Instead you allowed them to switch by having both players press Z at the same time.

Mizuki: Yeah. This way you can pass the baton to your partner if you want, or you don't have to switch positions at all. I guess it's kind of odd since switching characters is the whole selling point of Double Dash. (laughs) But we want all ages to enjoy Mario Kart, from very young kids to grandmas and grandpas, and we maintained that stance throughout the development.

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—The original Mario Kart had two-player co-op, then Mario Kart 64 had four-player... now with the LAN networking, you can have 8, or even 16 players.

Mizuki: 16 is probably a little tough to get together, but we definitely want people to try out the 8 player fights (using multiple Game Cubes).

Takahashi: If you have a widescreen TV, you could have 8-player matches on one TV. Although fitting eight players in front of one TV might be a little crowded. (laughs)

Mizuki: The 16-player debugging was crazy. (laughs) They were all packed into the debugging room like sardines. (laughs)

Everyone: (laughs)

Sugiyama: Sixteen sweaty dudes all snuggled up against each other. (laughs)

Mizuki: They said it was a lot of fun though, in spite of the crowding.

Sugiyama: The great thing about LAN play, compared to online multiplayer, is that you can see everyone in real-time, and all their reactions. "ARGhhh!! You got me!" Everyone gets into it. (laughs) One time, we tested out having everyone sit in different rooms and play, but people weren't really getting into it the same way.

Mizuki: We definitely want you to bring your Game Cube over to your friend's house… I mean, it has a handle!

Takahashi: A house with a big screen, preferably. (laughs)

Mizuki: With eight adults it gets a bit tight in front of the TV, but I think with smaller kids it can work.

Takahashi: This year, make it a very LAN Christmas with Double Dash! (laughs)

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