Mario Kart: Double Dash’s revolutionary two-driver mechanic almost didn’t happen

A recently translated interview reveals that Nintendo had an alternative version of Mario Kart: Double Dash in development which featured single-driver karts.

The main gimmick in Mario Kart: Double Dash, which was released on GameCube in 2003, is that players choose two characters instead of one. Both characters then ride the kart together – one at the front and one at the back – alternating between driving the kart and activating weapons.

However, according to a 2003 interview in Nintendo Dream magazine, which has recently been translated by Shmuplations, the two-rider gimmick nearly didn’t happen, as Nintendo was secretly working on a separate version of the game with the typical single-rider karts seen in the previous SNES, Nintendo 64 and GBA entries.

“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,” producer Shinya Takahashi explained in the interview. “Another issue for us was how to innovate while not destroying what makes Mario Kart unique. That was a monumental challenge.”

“Yeah, so you’ve got all these expectations,” producer Tadashi Sugiyama added, “and you’ve got to add something new. The ‘two drivers’ concept, therefore, was something we came to at the end of a very 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.”

Takashi then joked that this alternate version of the game was considered the team’s “emergency escape hatch”, as it allowed them to ditch the double-rider idea and swap over to the single-rider version if it wasn’t working well enough.

“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,” Sugiyama explained.

It was also revealed that the game was originally going to have motorbike-style sidecars for the second characters, instead of them sitting front-and-back, but that the idea was scrapped because of how it would have affected races.

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

While the solution was to have the second character ride behind the first, Sugiyama noted: “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.”

Mario Kart: Double Dash has never been re-released since its initial 2003 launch, but the addition of GameCube games to Switch 2 means it could eventually make it to Nintendo’s newest console.