Just poking a bit of fun at the more recent Mario Kart game naming conventions. MK7 and MK8 really kinda sound lazy, and even MKDS and MKWii do in fact. Double Dash!! was the last good Mario Kart game title. And I do think Mario Kart Advance was changed to Super Circuit in the West in order to liven the title up a bit. As for the first two Mario Karts, well the "Super" and "64" parts were the standard for game titles back in their respective days. Honestly I'm surprised The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past didn't get called "Super Legend of Zelda".  

Unfortunately, MK8 is the game's official title. I honestly like the "Mario Kart Advance" title more than
"Mario Kart Super Circuit", tbh.

Hopefully by the time MK8 gets released, it will actually have its own unique title...?

Q: In the logo of the game, it looks like you've incorporated a track, and in previous games, you've incorporated the checked flag - where do those ideas come from, that influence the art of each game, which seems to change for every iteration, which is somewhat different than most Nintendo and video game franchises.

Mr. Yabuki: It was kind of an organic thing, we were using the antigravity mechanic first, and we thought that was kind of fun, so they hit upon the idea of using a Möbius strip for the track. Then they made a Möbius strip track that kind of twists and turns, and we realized it looked like an eight, and this happened to be the 8th incarnation - and they said, well, that's the name right there "Mario Kart 8." The style just happened to kind of flow from this one mechanic, the antigravity, that they had gone with.

Mr. Konno: This is a little more abstract, but when we had "Mario Kart 7," we had the idea of calling it just "7," because it was something actually unique to the series - we hadn't used numbers before in any of the previous games, although the N64 had numbers. Mr. Iwata also like the idea of "7" being in the title. Then we started working on this project, and had the idea for this to be "Mario Kart 8" and there were some people who were opposed. They were like "Mr. Konno, didn’t you promise that we would only use the number 7, and that would be it for the numbering thing?"

So then what we did was grab those people, the staff members that were opposed to another numbered game, showed them the idea for the course, the Möbius strip, and how we twisted it into the number eight, and everyone was completely satisfied. "Oh, now we get it."

Someone who just saw "Mario Kart 7" and then "Mario Kart 8" - every day you see something like that, but then when you hear the story behind it, it makes complete sense. But, if you're not going to write that down about the story, then maybe it's not such a good idea to get out there.