Mario Kart XXL: The Rejected Experiment
Over the past few days, a new video depicting what appears to be a prototype for a Mario Kart game on the Game Boy Advance has been going viral. The demo itself looks very early and not all that fun to play, but what’s interesting about it is the fact that it uses two different Mode 7 planes to create a greater illusion of depth. This necessitated changing the angle so that not all of the approaching track could be seen.
Skeptics immediately arose, and they made some good points. For one thing, the rotating arrows on the menu screen are swiped from the SNES game Uniracers. For another thing, “XL” and “XXL” aren’t phrases used in Japan to imply hugeness, which is why the 3DS XL is called the “LL” there.
However, there is evidence that suggests this wasn’t faked. The video channel contains videos of several other prototypes, some of which came from the German game studio Denaris Entertainment Software. If you look at Denaris’ website with the Internet Archive, you can see Mario Kart XXL listed as a project of theirs. As for the “XXL” question, the old website implies this prototype was used as a pitch by Denaris to convince Nintendo to let them develop a Mario Kart game on the GBA, and that “Mario Kart XXL” was their temporary title. “XXL” does mean “big” in Germany.
If it was real, it was rejected for a reason. The demo’s perspective does not allow the player to see enough of the track. If it was tilted in such a way that we could see the horizon (like in every Mario Kart that’s been completed), the parallel Mode-7 effect would have been flattened and barely noticeable.
While Denaris might have failed to get the approval to work on Mario Kart, they did get to create several games for other publishers, though their work remained mostly in Europe.
[Source: Digital Trends]
https://youtu.be/zL8FdA3lshY