MARIO KART LIVE: HOME CIRCUIT — Behind the Scenes
On September 3rd, Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit was announced to the world as a unique partnership between Nintendo and Velan Studios. It’s our debut title and it’s been a three-year long journey to get to this point. It would be an understatement to say the team was absolutely overwhelmed by the positive reaction, excitement, and support from the community. As a developer, you never know how a game announcement will be received, especially when you’ve been toiling for such a long time on something so unconventional and different from what’s out there in the market. So, thank you, thank you!
Today, a behind the scenes video was released by Nintendo (along with a new trailer) to give you a glimpse of the development story of Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit.
It started as an experiment by a small team at Velan. Like many prototypes, the main goal was to “find the fun”. We built an RC car by kitbashing together drone parts, cameras, and sensors to create a unique third-person view driving experience. It gave us the exhilaration of speed and allowed us to see the world from a totally different perspective.
Although that was great, we wanted to take it further. An RC car can be difficult to control, so we made it drive as easily as a car in a video game. Adding actual game rules, mechanics, and visuals overlaid on the real world made it fun to play over and over. As we kept building our test tracks, we found another bit of magic: course creation. We could create the courses and obstacles we wanted anywhere and with household objects. And finally, Mixed Reality was how we wrapped the game structure around real-world play. It became much more than the buzzword-filled AR tech demos we were seeing at the time. The experience started to feel like a very unique game that we’d keep coming back to play, centered on three pillars: drive, build, and race.
After months of work on the initial prototype, the team felt we had the start of something really special. There was something immediate and satisfying about driving from the view of the car, and combining it with gameplay opened up a whole new kind of experience. Most importantly, it felt great to play. We took the demo to Kyoto, Japan, the home of Nintendo. Sometimes the best way to develop an idea is to show it to other creative people and jam on it.
We met with Nintendo to show them our early prototype. They played and felt the magic too. They recognized it as a new way to play Mario Kart. But we all knew there were some significant technical challenges that needed to be overcome. The easy way out would have been to see the long list of unsolved problems and say, “Nah, it will never work…or it’s just too risky to undertake.” We were fortunate that they believed, as we did, that once we had nailed the play-feel, the long patience to hone the experience would be totally worth it.
So, we went back to our studio with renewed energy to tackle these problems. We were embarking on a path to create a new Mixed Reality experience where we were discovering the fun of physical objects interacting with digital objects with tight controls and serious gameplay depth. It’s been three years of development of what seemed like one impossible problem to the next. Collaborating with some engineers and game designers at Nintendo to overcome these challenges has been quite the journey.
But along the way, we realized something more. Mixed reality toys and mixed reality gaming is a whole new dimension of play that is an incredibly exciting future for us as game developers and gamers. It is social. It is intuitive. It creates whole new play patterns and interactions that can be natural, yet unique. A whole lot of future possibilities to discover…but for now, October 16th can’t come soon enough!
Once more, thank you!
Karthik and Guha
