When it comes to the best Mario Kart title, fans in the series are divided. Some say its Mario Kart 64 with its solid racing gameplay, while others say its Mario Mart 8 with this vast amount of content, and still others claim that their personal favorite is the best. My favorite though? Mario Kart Double Dash. Now I'm not going to say it's a perfect game by any means, but you can't say this game didn't bring anything new to the table: the addition of two players on one kart, special items and karts for each character, Unlockable characters, and not to mention the 16 player races that use those Broadband adapters that no one I knew ever bought and now costs like $80 for one. So Forget about that dream now. But Double Dash wasn't the biggest hit when it was first revealed in playable form at E3 In fact, the press even called it a disappointment and perhaps the worst Mario Kart title. However, Nintendo managed to pull together and improve the game to what it is today And on this episode of Beta64, we're going to see how they fixed Mario Kart Double Dash. At E3 2001, Mario Kart Double Dash made its first appearance to the public in the form of a short trailer. This video shows off very very basic gameplay under the simple title "Mario Kart." Not only did this version lack any sky or even a real racetrack, It also borrowed the models of Mario and Luigi from Super Smash Bros. Melee The most interesting part of this 7 second trailer is that Mario and Luigi are racing in single person karts. For anyone who's ever played Double Dash, you know that the final game used two people per cart instead of one. But in the end since this trailer looks absolutely nothing like the final game, it's obvious that it just represents some of the developers early ideas for the game After this footage was shown, there was a silent period that lasted roughly two years and during this time, development of the game had actually begun. However, the team was having a difficult time trying to conceive gameplay that fans of the Mario Kart series would enjoy To make this even more challenging, Kiyoshi Mizuki, the chief director, Was required to make this game enjoyable for those who had never even played a title in the series. In order to accomplish this, he chose to make the gameplay as simplistic as he possibly could. Shigeru Miyamoto also played a role in this game as the producer and gave the team ideas that they were required to implement into the game. But despite requiring some things, he did allow the team to choose whatever art style they wanted most. Gameboy Advanced connectivity was also discussed during development. But the team agreed that the functionality just wasn't suited for the game so they never continued with the idea. Finally in April of 2003, the first screenshots of Mario Kart: Double Dash were shown. At this point two character racing was implemented and the final name had been decided as Double Dash. If we look at these images, you'll definitely see that some things were changed. Obviously first the HUD. The font is different for both the time and place in the race And if you look on the left side of the screen, You can see the top four characters which have very different portraits from the final game. And let's not forget the speedometer Which is a big departure from the final and the fact that the screen is missing the lap counter. We also got a screenshot of a 4 player race which has a completely different placement for HUD elements The same goes for to play races as well. Diving in deeper, if you look closely at the screenshot, do you notice anything wrong? Well the players in fifth place, right? So the four people ahead of Mario and Luigi are first, second, third, and fourth. But look at the left side of the screen. While peach and Daisy are indeed in first, the rest of them are in completely wrong places. Other screenshots taken around this time have the same problem as well. There are few other screenshots of specific courses that I'd like to spend a little extra time looking at. First, Peach Beach. If you look at the background, The Nintendo Sign was replaced with a "Mario Racing" sign and the pipe in the final game was originally going to be an opening blocked by planks of wood. This other image of Peach Beach gives us the opposite angle. While the red cruise ship is in both images, The blue ship is missing. Also, the green pipes are missing from the crates in the background, But the most interesting thing about this specific screenshot is how there are multiple Koopa Troopas and Taratroopas in the same race Which is not possible in the final game. There's actually one more image of this course we'll look at. Once again the cruise ship and the image is different in fact It looks completely different and is blue instead of red. Plus the ship is closer to the rock opening in the early screenshot compared to the final game The next course will see is Luigi Circuit which has more sunflowers as well as larger mountains compared to the final game. Also, I can't seem to find the blimp in the early screenshot though It may have just went off-screen. Like Peach Beach, a two-player screenshot provides us with a different camera angle You'll notice it's missing arrows on the road, the fence was meant to go up the hill instead of stopping, and more Interesting is the fact that the Luigi Circuit sign is missing. After these screenshots were revealed, There was another break in info until III 2003 when we first saw gameplay footage in addition to a playable demo. Let's take a closer Look at the first course in this footage, Luigi Circuit, which sports a different logo The intro of this course has a few differences too. First off, The HUD elements are in different places and there's no space between "Grand" and "Prix" If you look here you can also see that the blinks logo was changed. Behind that, you'll notice that the mountains are missing and at the end of the intro, The Transition between the intro and the gameplay is also missing. So instead of a flag pattern, it's just a cut. Moving on to the gameplay, the first thing you'll notice is that the countdown doesn't have any numbers appear on-screen and the place of the player doesn't appear either At least until the race starts when a different "Start" label is shown with the words "Go" instead of "Start." It also uses a different animation too. Something very interesting that I noticed in the gameplay Was that the average top speed in the e3 footage was around 75 miles per hour, but in the final game with the same characters and Karts, it averages near the low 50s. What's so interesting about this is that people who play both the E3 demo and the final game have said that the demo was slower than the final which means that just the speedometers displayed speed was lowered between then and now. Next up is DK Mountain, whose intro has changed quite a bit. Firstly, It appears that this course was first in the Mushroom Cup instead of the Star Cup though It is completely possible that this was just a placeholder. The logo for this course is slightly different too, as well as the sign at the beginning which was changed from DK Mountain to Donkey Cannon Additionally, There's an extra cloud up here. At the next scene, you'll definitely notice that the Sun is missing. Plus, there are larger rocks in the scene too. The last part of this intro has a couple differences as well First, The bridge planks are farther apart from each other and second the font for the Mario Kart sign was changed. Sadly in this footage. We only get to see the beginning of the stage. But even with only 10 seconds of gameplay, we can still make out some interesting changes. First off, the item boxes were moved from the first turn to underneath the sign and secondly when getting shot out of the cannon the speed peaks to over 320 miles per hour, while in the final game, it only reaches around 200, which is roughly a 120 mile per hour difference. The last course in this footage is Waluigi Stadium. However, it's only for 15 seconds. Some of the changes that found include: different ads on both sides of the track, the video screen says "Waluigi Stadium" instead of "Waluigi Kart," and the fireball seems smaller in the E3 footage. Later in August of 2003, at the Games Convention or "GC" Nintendo revealed some more updates they had added at that time including 16 player races using the GameCube LAN Adapter. They'd also fix some issues the press have had with the game at E3 by speeding up the gameplay and adding Mario Kart 64 Skid Boost, though It lacked any visuals like the wheel flames Nintendo had also added in character specific weapons like the Yoshi Egg. Another interesting thing is that Bob-omb Blast was described in an article as having the same question mark blocks as in normal modes, But in the final game, the question marks were replaced with Bob-omb icons. The last reveal before release was in September at Gamers Summit which showed a basically completed version of the game. Some players still notice one change though: The team had sped up the game again Which according to the press was a great change! Those who are worried about Double Dash being the worst Mario Kart title in the series, now believed it could be one of the best thanks to those changes. Now how about we take a look at unused objects? First, text and in order to understand why the following text is interesting, You have to know a little bit of info. In the final game, most of the courses are associated with specific characters: Peach Beach, Luigi Circuit, DK Mountain, etc. Some of the courses though don't seem to have anyone associated with them like Dino Dino Jungle. But it turns out that four of these courses that don't seem to have a character do indeed have one in the internal file name: Baby Park is specifically for Baby Luigi, Dino Dino Jungle is for Diddy Kong Mushroom Bridge is Koopa Troopa and lastly Mushroom City is for paratroopa and speaking of mushroom city, in the games files, there's an early unused mini-map for the course! It's twice the size of a normal mini-map and reads, "Patapatakōsumappu" which translated is Paratroopa course map. The last unused images are related to peach Beach or Technically the Award Course which has its own pack of files containing a mini map that never appears on screen Comparing it to the final map from Peach Beach, this version is rotated 180 degrees and it's twice the size Just like the other unused map We saw earlier The most interesting thing about this pack though is that it contains an early logo of Peach Beach Which is completely different and shows Peach with her hair down instead of in a ponytail like in the final logo So that's the beta of Mario Kart Double Dash! The thing I like most about this game's development is how the development team listened to the fans. They fixed what others belief were broken and that's something you don't see too often with big game developers. And These changes that were made were definitely for the better, And in the end, they created a game that gave me and my friends so many happy memories. So I just like to say, thanks. So this has been Beta64 with the development of Mario Kart: Double Dash. Thanks for watching!
Good video. Watched this earlier and now here I sit, playing some Double Dash. I wish the Wii U would get GC games on the eshop. This would look a lot better running through an HDMI port.
Holy cow, the speed WAS increased. I've never seen DK's kart move so slow.
Pretty interesting although I wish I could have actually seen some of the stuff he is talking about. :(