A new report indicates that the development work on Mario Kart World involved three times more staff members in the art department than the previous iteration of the game – Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Japanese industry analyst Papen (via Automaton Media) has said in its analysis of Nintendo’s personnel that the overall development team on Mario Kart World was expanded quite a bit over the previous game.
In its analysis, Papen wrote that the development of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe involved 18 developers working on game designers, 72 involved in programming, and 73 members in its art team, totalling up to 163 team members. Mario Kart World, on the other hand, had 22 game designers, 86 programmers, and 192 artists, totalling up to 300 employees.
The 192 members of the art team were further split into two distinct teams, with one working on field design, while the other team worked on character designs. The field design team involved 88 members, while the character designe team had 57 members.
The analysis by Papan also suggests that Mario Kart World’s development team had quite a few employees that were new to working on the franchise. Only 6 of the artists from the field design team, for instance, had previously worked on Mario Kart titles. The design team, on the other hand, only 3 artists that had previously worked on Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.
Xenoblade Chronicles developer Monolith Soft had revealed back in June that it had helped in the development of Mario Kart World. In a social media post, the studio revealed that it had been contracted to work on the field and character design teams for the kart racer.
Mario Kart World was released earlier this month as one of the launch titles for the Nintendo Switch 2. A report from earlier this month revealed that 782,566 physical copies of Mario Kart World had been sold in its first three days of release. These figures also included the copies part of the Mario Kart World Switch 2 bundle.
For the sake of comparison, Mario Kart World’s sales figure dwarfs those for both Mario Kart 8 Deluxe as well as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on the original Switch back in 2017. While Mario Kart 8 Deluxe had sold around 284,000 copies in the same time period, Breath of the Wild had sold around 186,000 copies.
Leading up to the kart racer’s release, Mario Kart World producer Kosuke Yabuki had spoken about how the game’s development team didn’t like referring to it as an “open-world” game because the phrase doesn’t offer much in the way of clarity of what the game would be about.
“We, on the development team side, we don’t call this world an open world,” said Yabuki. “Because in our view we don’t feel that the term open world is clear in terms of its definition.” Yabuki also mentioned that there Mario Kart World has a bigger world for players to explore. “We do have this expansive world, and we’ve placed therein the Mario Kart Circuit or the Bowser Castle, or the Choco Mountain, and tried to build a new Mario Kart.”.
For more details about Mario Kart World, check out our review.
