One of my personal favorite Mario Kart games is easily Mario Kart: Double Dash for the Gamecube. While I probably have the most nostalgia for the original on Super Nintendo and the Nintendo 64 game is great, Double Dash was just the most fun to me with friends thanks to the dual racers mechanic, and luckily it appears that Nintendo hasn’t completely forgotten about that. However, that does not mean that it will be in Mario Kart 8, sadly.
In a roundtable at GDC, Mario Kart 8 producer Hideki Konno discussed how the non-use of the mechanic outside of Double Dash is not as a result of dislike, but more due to the technical side.
It wasn’t just a simple case of, ‘Hey, we’re not going to do that again.’ We really think the two racers together in one kart of Double Dash was really unique, and we thought it worked really well.
We’ve got that in our pocket, so if we come up with any new, cool ideas that utilize having two players racing together, we will definitely grab that and possibly bring it back out.
Having two players racing together, it does have a pretty high cost in terms of processing power, so that is an obstacle. That being said, if we could come up with some ways around that processing cost, we may have two players, maybe even three players, racing together. If we could come up with some cool ideas, we’ll definitely use them.
In the age of downloadable content it would be incredible to see this added to Mario Kart 8 later, but it doesn’t sound like that will be the case. Also, with Nintendo consoles getting but one Mario Kart entry per system, it sounds like it will be awhile before we might see the return of the Double Dash mechanics.
