While traditionally the Mario Kart series has been developed in Japan, Texas-based Retro Studios ended up contributing to the latest game in the series. As it turns out, they did more than the Donkey Kong Country-themed course for Mario Kart 7.
"Of course, they were taking care of the game designing aspect," explained Miyamoto, the senior managing director and general manager of Nintendo's Entertainment Analysis and Development to Wired. "Specifically, they were taking care of the design of the courses and the artwork about that. But when it comes to the gameplay and the control mechanism itself, that's being taken care of by EAD once again."
"Mario Kart, I believe, was good in order to express that kind of different taste because we have many kinds of different courses for the Mario karts to run and race around," he continued. "So for each of the different courses, we could identify: Retro is supposed to take care of this course, and EAD is going to do that, and such and such. Then, we were able to join forces in order to realize a variety of different courses, a variety of different tastes. I think that's one reason how it worked out well between a Japanese development team and a Western development team."
The Nintendo owned Retro Studios have worked on notable franchises in the past, including Donkey Kong Country and Metroid. However, Miyamoto says that Retro might be given one of their crown jewel IPs to work on for the Wii U.
"As you know, we have already collaborated with Retro for the Metroid Prime series in the past,” said Miyamoto. “And I think when we talk about any other franchise, Zelda might be a possible franchise for that collaboration."
