Hideki Konno quotes:

When we were designing Mario Kart 64, we wanted it to feel like the player is controlling an RC car.... If you play this game and get this feeling, then we will be happy because we accomplished our goal.

Game balance is a really important element of Mario Kart that we look very, very closely at and place a lot of value on,

This is the eighth game in the series and when we work on a Mario Kart title, we work on courses and we create them and then we work on them again, and again, and again, and we revise until we come up with something that we think is going to be fun for everyone to play over and over again. So we have a lot of confidence in our ability to do so, but we understand what a tough challenge it is to create those courses.