During the course of developing Mario Kart World, the team making it were confronted with an important, potentially existential question: Does Mario, in fact, eat mushrooms? Meaning, do Super Mushrooms in the Mario universe need to be eaten, or simply touched to imbue Mario (and Luigi) with super powers?
The answer to that question may seem obvious to you, but even 20-year Nintendo veteran Shintaro Jikumaru wondered if he really understood the delivery mechanism of a Mushroom Kingdom mushroom. Jikumaru and Mario Kart World producer Kosuke Yabuki did their due diligence on the matter, turning to Nintendo executive Takashi Tezuka for the answer. Tezuka served as assistant director on the original Super Mario Bros., and has produced or supervised dozens of Mario games since, so if anyone would know, it’s him.
The Mario Kart World devs raised the question in the first place because Jikumaru was inspired to add food — hamburgers, specifically — to the new open-world Mario Kart. That required game designers to implement food-eating animations.
“We thought, why don’t we have a drive-thru system where characters eat while driving, and eating makes them change outfits or transform into a different character?” Yabuki explained. “Though, it’s utterly ridiculous.”
The addition of hamburgers (and other regional foods that cause wardrobe changes) to Mario Kart World forced Yabuki and Jikumaru to face a fact about the rules of the Super Mario universe. In a new Ask the Developer interview at Nintendo, they explain:
Yabuki: Then, the question came up: “Does Mario, in fact, eat mushrooms?” (Laughs)
Jikumaru: So in the midst of development, we went up to Tezuka-san and asked him to confirm, “Is Mario actually eating those mushrooms?”
Yabuki: That’s right. And Tezuka-san answers, “Yeah, he is.”
Longtime Mario fans will probably point to games like the Mario & Luigi series, where the brothers are clearly shown throwing edible power-ups into their mouths, or The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which makes it obvious that Mario eats mushrooms to unlock their effects, but touches items like Fire Flowers and Super Stars to gain their powers. Still, you can appreciate that Mario Kart World’s creators desire to be thorough, and that there’s some amount of inconsistency in the dozens of power-ups in Mario games. In Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, for example, when Mario uses a Super Mushroom in a race, he is not shown eating it; instead, it is implied the mushroom is given to the kart itself, like some sort of NOS injection.
But questions about which Super Mario power-ups Mario eats versus what he merely touches may be up for debate. And there are plenty of other unknowns. Consider:
You can probably tell that if I ever get an interview with Takashi Tezuka (highly unlikely after this story) I will have dozens of questions for him that he will get increasingly annoyed by.
