Summary
When you think ofMario Kart World, you’re probably thinking about the massive open world, all the new courses, or even the$80 price tagthat everyone has been criticising. However, if you’re over all those things, you’re probably wondering about the massive roster that the game will feature, including some new faces.
These new faces aren’t exactly original characters, butNintendohas decided to let NPCs like Goombas and Hammer Bros take the wheel in Mario Kart World. However, everybody has already decided who their favourite character is – Moo Moo the cow. Nintendo has now revealed how it came to be.
Everybody Loves Moo Moo
Speaking at a roundtableinterviewfor Nintendo, developer Masaaki Ishikawa revealed how these NPCs became drivers, and how the cow was the one who made it happen. “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,” said Ishikawa.
“And then one of the designers came up with that silly sketch of Cow cruising along, and I thought to myself, ‘This is it!’ So that’s when we realized the course surroundings actually contained a lot of untapped resources." Why come up with new characters, when there are already so many of them in the series already?
“The character designer quickly put together a prototype of Cow that could race, and surprisingly it didn’t feel out of place at all. So we thought maybe we could include other obstacle characters, and decided to add Cheep Cheep and Pokey as racers,” he continued. “As a result, the idea of taking obstacle characters, usually found in courses in past games, and having them participate in races made sense to me in terms of an interconnected world.”
It seems that besides being cute, the cow also helped the devs think of other ideas, like the power to summon Kamek. It also inspired other obstacle animals like a giraffe and a camel. Clearly, she has come a long way from simply grazing at Moo Moo Meadow. “Cow is actually a pivotal character in the Mario Kart series,” concluded Ishikawa.
