Once just an innocent grazing farm animal with a love of grass, Cow in Mario Kart has certainly “moo-ved” up the ranks in recent times. When you saw cows in Nintendo’s most popular game of all time, they were just something to avoid bumping into and they easily faded into the background. While creative fans have tried to imagine with mods what would happen if the cow in the background of Moo Moo Meadows could drive a kart, for 30 years, that sort of an idea was just relegated to the world of dreams. Not so in Mario Kart World, the Nintendo Switch 2’s day-one launch title, which features a vast, inter-connected world, several new shiny features — and a huge promotion for Cow.
“In previous Mario Karts, this was really just a background element or even an obstacle,” Mario Kart World producer Kosuke Yabuki tells Inverse in an interview translated from Japanese, “Now this is a playable character, so I imagined that fans of the series from way back would be really happy to see something like that, and that’s our motivation for including it this time.”
