It’s hard to imagine, but Mario Kart: Double Dash’s two-player driving mechanic didn’t happen!
As I am sure you know, in Mario Kart: Double Dash, rather than only choosing one character to plop into a kart of your choosing, players instead select two characters to ride in a kart together, with one at the back and one at the front.
However, Nintendo was anxious about introducing this mechanic into the Mario Kart series, so also worked on a “single-driver version” in tandem with the doubled-up driver version we all know today.
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That’s according to a 2003 interview with Mario Kart: Double Dash’s developers, which first featured in Nintendo Dream magazine but has been freshly translated by Shmuplations. Within this interview, producer Shinya Takahashi explained that “since Mario Kart has always been more of a party game”, the team’s “point-of-departure for the development was thinking about what new multiplayer gameplay mechanics we could add, and specifically what new mechanics we could add if the karts had two drivers”.