Mario Motors (lost build of unreleased Nintendo DS racer; early 2000s)

A screenshot of Mario Motors, featuring Mario and an unknown character.

Status: Lost

Mario Motors was a planned Nintendo DS spinoff of the Mario Kart series. The game was the brainchild of Yoot Saito, who previously created such games as Seaman, SimTower, and Odama.

History

At the Reboot Develop Conference 2018, Yoot Saito revealed for the first time a cancelled game for the Nintendo DS game, Mario Motors.^[1] On stage, Saito talked about the development and story of how the game was first conceived:

In the early 2000s, Saito was good friends with Shigeru Miyamoto and the former president of Nintendo Satoru Iwata. All three would usually meet up and chat over tea, usually about game ideas. At one such meeting, Saito was asked by Iwata on what he was interested in lately, and he answered Iwata with sculpting chunks of metal. Saito then explained his "crazy idea" to Iwata and Miyamoto while they sat in silence.

In the end, both Iwata and Miyamoto said that the project sounded interesting and said that they could give it a try.^[2] The development of this title is unknown, as well as the fact on how the game got cancelled, as Saito said he couldn't give an exact reason why.

Gameplay

The main concept of Mario Motors was that players could build engines (and presumably, other parts of vehicles) out of chunks of metal. For example, a player could shave and sculpt metal into a cylinder which could be added into an engine and decide the ability of said engine.^[3]

There was also a plan to add blowing the DS mic into a part of the game that teaches acceleration, but that was canned because of the fear of a child losing breath.^[3]

Despite being in the Mario Kart series, it's unknown how much the game revolved around racing, as no tracks were ever announced and the only two characters were shown in concept art. These characters shown were Mario and an unknown elderly scientist character.