A portion of a Nintendo internal interview with Super Mario Kart devs Tadashi Sugiyama and Hideki Konno...
Interviewer: How did you come to make Super Mario Kart in the first place?
Konno: Miyamoto assigned us the task of making F-ZERO3 for two players.
Sugiyama: F-ZERO was a racing game for a single player.
Interviewer: Super NES had two controllers, so I suppose he wanted to make use of them both.
Konno: Yes.
Interviewer: But if it started as F-ZERO for two players, then it had nothing to do with Mario!
Konno: That's right. We didn't at all have the concept of a racing game with Mario. We began with experiments for a multiplayer F-ZERO game. In F-ZERO, you race at over 400 kilometers per hour along incredibly long straight lines, but we realized that splitting the screen into upper and lower portions for two players to do the same thing was out of the question.
Sugiyama: Due to hardware constraints, it was impossible to display tracks with long straight lines in two windows on the screen.
Konno: If you look back at the Super Mario Kart tracks, you'll understand. Instead of tracks with long straight lines, the track designs are compact, with lots of twists and turns so they fit well within a square.
from GoNintendo
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