Mario Kart World will be launched alongside the Nintendo Switch 2 on June 5, 2025, and aims to revolutionize the Mario Kart series. The main reason the game isn’t called Mario Kart 9 is because of the game’s ambitious goals, as explained by Nintendo.
In a new edition of the Ask The Developer series on the official Nintendo website, producer Kosuke Yabuki explained why the game was not given a number in the title.
He said, “If the idea was just to add more courses, we probably would have called it Mario Kart 9. This time, however, we took a different approach. We wanted to take the series to the next level, so we decided to abandon the numbering and focus on a brand new title: Mario Kart World. We had already included ‘MARIO KART WORLD’ in the concept art early on in development.”
The name, therefore, reflects the new essence of the next Mario Kart game, which for the first time ever will feature interconnected tracks that create a single world.
Yabuki explained, “In previous Mario Kart games, after you completed a course, you would move on to the next one. However, I thought that with modern technology, the ability to seamlessly transition from one course to another and create a single, vast world was within our capabilities. So, with that in mind, we decided to create a new kind of Mario Kart.”
In related news, the team behind Mario Kart World initially developed it for the Switch but switched to the Switch 2 due to technical limitations.
