Email: On Mario Kart and not enough designers

There’s no reason for speculation about Nintendo hiding motives when calling on Retro’s staff for Mario Kart. Frequently, in the Malstrom blog, there is a real lack of understanding of Japanese development. Malstrom himself has said before, in various capacities, that he doesn’t get the Japanese, and doesn’t seem to care to. (A reason, one supposes, there’s been so much bizarre speculation and jumping to conclusions about Japanese developers in general, and Nintendo in particular.)

In this case, the claimed motive of Mario Kart 7 being rushed to completion without sacrificing content is all there is to it. Nintendo knows Retro is talented, but in this case, required them as trusted additional boots on the ground for the grunt work of constructing and testing courses for the game. One might ask “but Mario Kart is so important, surely Nintendo would have plenty of staff to finish it in time if they really wanted.” You can’t assume that. Something you must understand, if you can swing it, about Japanese developers is that they are, indeed, behind the times compared to the rest of the world in terms of organization of their resources. Simply put, their production methods did not scale up as time went by. They’re very insular and their methods were supported, for a long time, by the smaller population of their home territory and a healthy market for games of small scope there.

Nintendo is not magically immune to this. They were always structured like a Japanese developer as well. This was given away in that, for any game past a certain level of complexity, they take far longer to finish and polish it than most western developers would, once they enter full production. In point of fact, Nintendo has clammed up tight about future game development for this very reason. If one recalls, before a few years ago, Nintendo would regularly preview or at least hint that they had various titles in development over a year before they were scheduled for release. This lead to disasters like The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess being delayed again and again – and long before any decision was made to create a Wii version, which itself caused another delay.

Nintendo has responded to their own difficulty by ceasing to release almost any news about specific games in development; they now only truly reveal them about six to nine months before release. Their last exception to this was Skyward Sword, which was, predictably, delayed much past their original projection when they first revealed it.

You assumed I was looking at it from a development standpoint. This site has been, and always is, always looking at the business context of it.

Nintendo has very sophisticated business minds in its company. They know the importance of critical software at the right time to create momentum. Everything depends on this critical software.

Mario Kart is the most important franchise to Nintendo from a momentum perspective. And given that the 3DS needs momentum, the importance on Mario Kart 7 would only go up.

Nintendo has always been traditionally unwilling to work with outside developers, especially Western ones, on core games involving Mario. All I am saying is that there is another story going on here.

What I suspect is going on is that Nintendo is pushing their artists to learn the styles and ways of Western graphical artists. A good way to do that is to work with Retro. The business reasons for this is very obvious as Nintendo needs to sell world-wide and the Japanese graphical flavor doesn’t work with Western audiences. But for more evidence this is likely highly probable, it was mentioned in the interview several times. The Japanese Nintendo developers said they literally want to learn from Retro’s art style.

Now, why would a Japanese developer say that? Notice it isn’t going the other way around.