An Early Prototype of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Has Been Leaked

Mario is unarguably one of the most popular characters from the classic era of gaming. It is now a franchise that will live forever, and with a new movie coming along, we should not forget some of the things that brought it to where it is right now.

One recent, although 5-year-old game, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, saw massive success after its release in 2017. It is undoubtedly the most popular and well-known Mario Kart game, and according to the latest leak, we can finally see one of its early prototypes.

The prototype was leaked by Twitter user trashbandatcoot, and although we cannot verify the credibility, we should know that such prototypes are hard to fabricate. Since we also have gameplay that will be shared later on, there is no reason to suspect this is fake.

The prototype has a build date of 2016/10/18 09:37:23 and has enabled debug features. There are many things that were either scrapped or placeholders here. Still, they will likely not arrive in upcoming content, so if you see an unfamiliar name, hold your horses.


Major Points

  • An early Mario Kart 8 Deluxe prototype has been leaked, showing some unseen content.
  • Along with images of said content, we also have some gameplay to show its earliest look in-game.
  • After further research, leakers have also extracted the NX Logo, a codename for Nintendo Switch. 

It might be a lucky day for Mario fans because we have gameplay of the early prototype and some information on Nintendo Switch that has never been outside Nintendo. But first off, let’s discuss the things from the prototype.

In the 1st image of the tweet, we can see many Mii outfits. But in the top-right corner of the 1st image, we see the controllers’ name as “NXDouble,” and for those unfamiliar, NX is a codename for Switch. 

And before we had its iconic logo/bootup animation,  we had something that was hidden from the fanbase. But after the leakers thoroughly investigated the prototype, we finally had our first look at it.

For many, this may look simplistic and nothing too special, but this is the animation for early Switch, and it has never been made public. It is a big deal that we found the animation on one of the games’ early prototypes. 

In addition, YouTuber togemet2 posted a video that shows the gameplay of the leaked prototype, and the game still looks outstanding.

He further mentioned in the description that “This build is designed for development kits on version 0.8.5, but is playable on modern firmware thanks to a patch created by OatmealDome. It was recovered from an ODIN eMMC which was, for whatever reason, discarded by Nintendo. A pretty extensive debug menu can also be opened by pressing Plus + Minus whilst on the title screen or in an active race.

The EMMC ODIN chip(Prototype Switch Board name) was recovered almost a year ago, so it is a surprise it took them this long to gather such data, but better late than never. The build looks nice, and we have a good look at some hidden things which we probably never would have seen.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you like the early bootup animation for NX? Share your thoughts with us below, and we will get back to you!

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