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

History

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. 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. 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. No tracks were ever announced and the only two characters shown in concept art for the game was Mario and an unknown elderly scientist character.

Gallery

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See Also

• BS Super Mario Collection (partially lost Satellaview broadcast versions of compilation platformer; 1997-1998)
• Mario Artist (lost builds of unreleased Nintendo 64DD games; 1999-2000)
• Mario's Castle (lost build of cancelled game on Nintendo's "Project Atlantis" handheld console; existence unconfirmed; 1995-1998)
• Mario Demo (lost Virtual Boy tech demo; 1994)
• Mario's Face (lost Nintendo DS tech demo; 2004)
• Mario Kart XXL (lost Game Boy Advance tech demo; 2004)
• New Super Mario Bros. Mii (lost Wii U tech demo; 2011)
• Super Mario 128 (lost build of cancelled GameCube/Wii game; 2000-2006)
• Super Mario 64 (partially found Spaceworld '95 demo of Nintendo 64 3D platformer; 1995)
• Super Mario Bros. 3 (lost Japanese prototype of NES platformer; 1987-1988)
• Super Mario Bros. (lost Commodore 64 port of NES platformer; existence unconfirmed; 1986)
• Super Mario Disk Version aka "Super Mario 64DD" (found unreleased Nintendo 64DD port of 3D platformer; 1999)
• Super Mario Kart R (partially found pre-release version of "Mario Kart 64"; 1995)
• Super Mario RPG 2 (lost pre-release version of "Paper Mario" Nintendo 64 role-playing game; late 1990s)
• Super Mario Spikers (lost build of cancelled Wii volleyball-wrestling sports game; 2007)
• Super Mario's Wacky Worlds (found prototype of cancelled CD-i game; 1993)
• Super Mario World: Mario Attack (lost Japanese arcade game; 1996)
• Super Mario World (partially found early build of Super Nintendo platformer; 1989)
• Super Paper Mario (lost build of unreleased original GameCube version of Wii side-scrolling platformer; 2006)