In recent years, video game recomps have taken the internet by storm. Whether it’s Super Mario Galaxy for 3DS, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom for PC or Mario Kart 8 Deluxe as a browser game, we’re seeing tons and tons of popular titles ported to everything under the sun. It’s basically a video game homebrew gold rush, and a situation which has overwhelmed many communities involved in it due to the prevalence of AI in these projects.
And now it seems like Switch 2 titles may be next in line for this treatment. Why? Because a Twitter user by the name of Will Faust has shown footage of what appears to be Mario Kart World running on MacOS. Take a look:
Mario Kart World on macOS via nxnative fork https://t.co/grktRkRwRI
— Will Faust (@willfaustcuber) October 27, 2026
Yeah, as you can guess, it’s rough to say the least. The colours are so yellow and washed out it burns the eyes, and the performance is questionable at best. There are graphical glitches galore, and it’s as far from a finished product as you can possibly imagine.
But it is recognisably Mario Kart World, and it is seemingly running on a MacOS with the help of a modified version of the nxnative framework. What’s more, it’s been improved and ported to iOS too:
Mario Kart World on iPhone 18 Pro via my private nxnative fork.
Physical memory usage is fairly low due to implementing userspace file-backed memory (swap like).
Disclaimer: I will not be releasing the code for this project anywhere. https://t.co/ttty2JaUdO
— Will Faust (@willfaustcuber) October 28, 2026
So, what’s going on? How is this possible?
Well, according to various Switch homebrew devs and dataminers, much of the architecture is still the same as on Switch 1. It’s still running on ARM with the Horizon Operating System, and the models, textures and other assets use the same formats as their Switch 1 counterparts. So, while the system has various hardware changes, it’s not enough to make it impossible for an AI-driven system to figure out the format of its games given enough tokens and resources.
Hence people are forking Switch 1 emulation and recompilation tools like nxnative, and using them to get Switch 2 titles up and running as well.
Add this to Switch 2 ROMs being dumped recently due to a certain exploit, and well, there are a lot of people throwing AI resources at the files to get ’em working on other devices.
What’s more, Mario Kart World is seemingly just the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, in addition to that project, there was also early footage of a Pokopia recomp going around online too, as well as a Donkey Kong Bananza recomp being demonstrated there as well.
Bananza https://t.co/QcvYpeQU5S
— AzRage (@azoxrage) October 28, 2026
There’s also word of a Switch 2 emulator in development, but it’s a lot rougher around the edges than any of the game specific recomps being demonstrated at the moment.
Which raises an important question here. What is Nintendo’s reaction going to be?
Because they’ve already gone after a few projects like this in the past. The video showing the original Switch 2 exploit was copyright struck off of Twitter, as were some tweets from Centro Leaks showing models extracted from Switch 2 games.
Heck, they’ve just hit a video showing Splatoon Raiders running in an emulator:
So, we expect a lot of these projects to get cease and desist notices at minimum, and potentially a lawsuit or two at the most.
Regardless, what do you think? Do you find it interesting that people are already trying to port Switch 2 titles to other platforms? What’s the likelihood that we’ll see stable versions of these games for PC or mobile in the foreseeable future?
Leave your thoughts in the comments below, or on our Discord server today!
Mario Kart World ‘Recomp’ Footage (Will Faust on Twitter)