- this was the first international development in the Mario Kart series
- Mario Kart 7 originally had 8 people working on it
- the extension of development on Skyward Sword took team members away from Mario Kart 7
- Retro was nervous to work with Nintendo on Mario Kart
- the dev teams went out to dinner and Nintendo gave Retro a toast that made them at ease
- Iwata describes Nintendo's feeling on the collaboration...

...we had Konno-san, who knew we didn't have enough people and thought we should borrow help from overseas and do our best that way. We had Morimoto-san and Ishikawa-san, who were worried about their first project with people from overseas. Then Ichijo-san, who was psyched up about the project, joined us. A little over a year ago, these people came together into a team and got down to work.

- Retro first went to Nintendo for a visit, then Nintendo visited Retro's offices
- Iwata discusses the balance that Mario Kart must have...

...you have to design courses that will make for an interesting racing game, you have to create visuals that will satisfy today's gamers, and you have to express a feeling of lots of variety within 60 frames per second.

- Nintendo produced half the courses and Retro produced the other half
- Retro first worked on the classic courses
- Retro looked back and forth between Mario Kart 7 and Luigi's Mansion to get the Luigi's Mansion course right
- Retro put one dev on each course, and had weekly contact with Nintendo
- Retro worked on character animations that wouldn't clash with new kart elements like the glider
- working on the jump action made it even tougher when trying not to have the characters' heads bump through the gliders
- Retro discusses the importance of having Nintendo work alongside them on the project...

I don't know how we would have done it without Ichijo-san, to be honest. He was sending us screenshots of tools that were still in Japanese, with notes saying what the buttons did, and helping us not only translate text but also translate feeling and the goals we were trying to get. I left the project towards the end to work on other projects, and Bill Vandervoort who came in during the process was working with Ichijo-san very closely, and he had the same feeling.

- Retro's work on previous Nintendo titles have helped them to nail down what the feeling of a Nintendo game should be
- Retro was nervous the first time they tested the game online, since they wanted to make sure they looked like they knew how to play well
- Retro was honored to have some of their staff ghost times included in the final game
- one night during a video conference, the teams had to resort to hand gestures to convey ideas due to a poor connection
- Nintendo shared some Retro concept art for the game...



- Nintendo feels the Mario Kart series is 'for everyone to get excited playing together'
- Nintendo says Mario Kart is about finding the balance between the player realizing their skilled driving and the items that pop up
- the sound composer often discusses the overall image or atmosphere of the courses with the designers and planners while making the music
- the teams didn't bring over all old elements due to the amount of new features that were added
- retaining all old Mario Kart aspects with all the new would have lead to too much data
- Konno played the game thousands of times before release
- Mario Kart Wii was tweaked to have floating/flying karts as a way to sell the idea of adding gliders to Mario Kart 7
- the idea of including coins again came up during previous Mario Kart titles, but the idea was always discussed and dropped during the end of the project
- this time coins were mentioned from the start
- some kart customizations are faster on land, but worse underwater
- for real players, if you want your opponent's parts, you just have to race and beat them
- Nintendo details the process of including all the communication features

...early on we were making the Community, where you can easily gather with like-minded players online. But we didn't think of the Mario Kart Channel for StreetPass and SpotPass until quite a bit later.

- you can race people on the Internet over and over even if you haven't exchanged Friend Codes
- Nintendo originally wanted to include a feature where friends could gather like this directly on Nintendo 3DS, but time constraints pushed the feature out
- Nintendogs + Cats' Journal for checking your StreetPass content was the inspiration for Mario Kart Channel
- you can race 7 ghosts at once
- on the dev team, Konno say, "Shiraiwa-san, you're always Banana Master"
- Shiraiwa and Konno play online games together in their personal time, and this lead to some of the ideas included in the online features for Mario Kart 7
- the dev team wasn't sure they could achieve their goal of having the game run at 60FPS at all time
- it took a lot of hard work to achieve this, especially when including the goals of other dev team members
- Konno suggested the inclusion of Wuhu Island, which ended up being one of the toughest tracks to get running at 60 FPS
- Mario Kart 7 composer Nagata shares his goals for the project...

I pay attention to the sound of the engines every time. I also try to make sure the background music doesn't simply sound like racing-game music. It's like Mario's blood runs through Mario Kart. Luckily, a lot of fans enjoy the music from past Mario Kart games, so this time as well I tried to make memorable music.

- Nagata changed the music for when you're in the air and underwater
- the music also gets another layer if you're in first place
- this change to first place music slowly fades away as your second place opponent closes in
- if you get hit with a shell, this layer to the music ends abruptly
- one of the devs that handled the gyro-controls is a big fan of cars, which lent to his development of this aspect
- the dev team wasn't ready for players to go into first-person, so the karts weren't made with that kind of detail in mind originally
- if driving in first person, the camera will pull back a bit when you're hit to let you know what happened
- the screen would originally spin when you got hit, but the dev team felt this made the player too dizzy when it first person
- Super Mario 3D Land's dev team even used Mario Kart 7 as a reference during development when it came to 3D
- each item was adjusted individually for 3D impact
- Konno says he's received a ton of emails from people around the world, all encouraging Mario Kart 7's development

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