Famitsu interviews Miyamoto about Mario Kart 7, explains glider/underwater additions, name

"Mario Kart is a pretty stable series, all things considered, so production duties were chiefly handled by Hideki Konno while I mostly oversaw the complete picture. With Mario Kart Wii, that included the idea of the steering wheel, and with this one, that included things like the idea of adding hang-gliding stuff to Mario Kart. I make the decisions involving new things to build the gameplay with, in other words.

The way the gliders fly isn't particularly faithful to real life, but I think it feels pretty good in action. I was actually pretty well against some of the customization features of the game, though. It can be fun to win money for racing and use it to buy parts and such, but I didn't think that had much to do with the core fun of the series. The idea for that came from the studio staff, though, and my final response was 'If you can build this customization on top of a solid control and gameplay foundation, then go ahead.'

Sometimes people yelled at me to look at things more closely, but like I said, the core of Mario Kart is pretty solid by this point and I think it's safe to have it evolve in a pretty staid and traditional manner. The basic message here is 'Mario Kart's been powered up for the Nintendo 3DS,' and I think the online upgrades in particular are pretty neat. A lot of time was spent on how to get all the individual components working together -- Wi-Fi and Street Pass, local and Internet play.

Coming up with the title was actually a lot of trouble for us, but it is the seventh game, and so it just sort of came down to what felt best. Besides, 7 is supposed to be a lucky number, isn't it?" - Shigeru Miyamoto
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