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Nintendo updated Drag x Drive, its wheelchair basketball game for the Switch 2, adding a Survival Tag mode for existing players and a demo for those who haven’t picked it up yet. The company also shared an Ask the Developer interview series about it, with Director Yoshinori Konishi and Programmer Hiroki Hamaue mentioning the idea stemmed from experimentations with Switch 2 mouse control possibilities.
With the update, there are a few details about how Survival Tag works in the Drag x Drive patch notes. After updating to 1.2.0, it will be available as an option in LAN, local wireless, and Friend Parks. It’s essentially a game of tag. The announcement confirmed the nature of it means “a tag is considered successful if there was contact from either perspective.” The person who is it chases others around, and tagged people are eliminated.
In the case of how Drag x Drive started with mouse control scheme experimentation and turned into a wheelchair basketball game, Hiroki Hamaue talked about how the “wheel” rolling element started. He noted, “To explore the possibilities of mouse controls, we played prototypes of various games that used, for example, one mouse in each hand, or combined mouse actions with control stick movements and button presses… We discovered that by adding a rattling vibration in sync with mouse movements, it felt like you were actually turning a wheel. We tried pairing this with sliding the mice back and forth with both hands, just to see what would happen. That’s when we realised, ‘Hey, this feels a bit like manoeuvring a wheelchair.’”
Yoshinori Konishi then said that was what led to the actual game being developed. He noted, “This caught the attention of the producers, and I was asked to turn it into a sports game… If we went with basketball, all you’d have to do is move under the basket and flick the Joy-Con 2 controller forward to shoot.”
Drag x Drive is available for the Switch 2 worldwide, and there is a free demo.
