“This Is It!”

What an udder surprise

by Ollie Reynolds Yesterday, 7:45pm

Image: Nintendo
If you watched any of the reactions to the Mario Kart World reveal trailer, then chances are you saw somebody loudly exclaim “you can play as a COW?!”.

Yes, the cow, an NPC character known for its presence in Moo Moo Meadows, is now playable in the upcoming Mario Kart tile for Switch 2. In the recent Ask the Developer interview over at Nintendo, Masaaki Ishikawa explained the reasoning behind Cow’s inclusion.

Honestly, it seems to have simply been a case of pondering what new additions could be added after Mario Kart 8 Deluxe included so many newcomers. Here’s what Ishikawa had to say:

“Each new Mario Kart game features new characters to race with, but since we added so many to the previous game, we wondered where we could go from there. And then one of the designers came up with that silly sketch of Cow cruising along, and I thought to myself, “This is it!” (Laughs) So that’s when we realized the course surroundings actually contained a lot of untapped resources.

“The character designer quickly put together a prototype of Cow that could race, and surprisingly it didn’t feel out of place at all. So we thought maybe we could include other obstacle characters, and decided to add Cheep Cheep and Pokey as racers. As a result, the idea of taking obstacle characters, usually found in courses in past games, and having them participate in races made sense to me in terms of an interconnected world.”

Characters such as Cow and Cheep Cheep are known as ‘NPC Racers’ within Nintendo, with Ishikawa joking that Cow in particular “is actually a pivotal character in the Mario Kart series”.

To coincide with the information from the Ask the Developer interview, Nintendo has also released new footage from Mario Kart World showcasing Cow taking part in one of the game’s missions, as shown by TodayNews on BlueSky. The task? “Mooove” through a herd of cows, of course. Chortle!

Mario Kart World is scheduled to launch alongside the Switch 2 on 5th June 2025. Nintendo also revealed that the game was originally in development for Switch 1, and also explained why it chose not to call the game ‘Mario Kart 9’.

Will Cow be a go-to racer for you in Mario Kart World? Or do you have another character in mind? Let us know.

[source nintendo.com]

Nintendo Life’s resident horror fanatic, when he’s not knee-deep in Resident Evil and Silent Hill lore, Ollie likes to dive into a good horror book while nursing a lovely cup of tea. He also enjoys long walks and listens to everything from TOOL to Chuck Berry.

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