Mario Kart

• 1. Introduction

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  Mario Kart is a Nintendo series of kart racing games that now counts seventeen entries, stretching from a Super Nintendo cartridge in 1992 to a Nintendo Switch 2 launch title released on the 5th of June 2025. Eight of those games run on home consoles and three on handhelds. Five are arcade machines co-developed with Namco, and one was made for mobile phones. The racers come from the Mario universe and drive on tracks modelled on Mario locations. Guests have also shown up from Pac-Man, Taiko no Tatsujin, The Legend of Zelda, Animal Crossing and Splatoon. The premise is simple: go-karts, a pile of power-up items, and a finish line. Yet the series has produced a courtroom fight in Tokyo, a theme park ride, and a real-world electric racing rule. How did a game born from a gap in another racer become so durable? Why does the driver in last place so often hold the most powerful weapon? And what became of the Mario Kart games that were started but never reached the shelves?

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• 2. A Racing Game Without Rivals

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  Shigeru Miyamoto, the designer behind Super Mario Bros., oversaw the development of Super Mario Kart. The spark was a gap in another Nintendo racer. F-Zero offered no way for two people to race together. Adding that feature came at a price. The hardware resources devoted to multiplayer forced the tracks to shrink well below the size of F-Zero's courses, so designers built them around turns instead of long stretches of raw speed.

  The original game let a player choose one of eight Mario characters, each with different strengths. Solo players raced computer-controlled opponents in four cups of five tracks each, which made twenty tracks in total. Those cups came at three difficulty levels: 50cc, 100cc and 150cc. A Time Trial mode let drivers race the clock instead.

  Two players could split the screen to take on the cups together, or face each other one-on-one in Match Race. A third multiplayer option, Battle Mode, was a duel of attrition. Players hit one another with power-ups and tried to burst the balloons that surrounded each kart. Later games would keep reshuffling what happened when those balloons ran out.

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• 3. The Catch-Up Machine

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  Item boxes laid out along each course are where Mario Kart decides who gets what. Drive through one and the game picks your item according to where you are running in the race. The series relies on a mechanism known as rubber banding. A racer far behind might be handed a Bullet Bill, which makes the kart invincible while it autopilots forward at great speed. The leader tends to receive modest defensive items such as Shells or Bananas. The goal is to give trailing drivers a realistic chance of catching the front.

  Mushrooms for a speed boost, Red and Green Shells to throw at opponents, and Banana Peels left on the road make up the usual toolkit. The exact mix changes from game to game.

  Mario Kart 64 widened that toolkit with the Fake Item Box, the Golden Mushroom and the Spiny Shell. It also added item dangling, which lets a player trail bananas and shells behind the kart as protection against incoming projectiles, and hold a reserve item as well. Double Dash!! gave the Spiny Shell an explosion that hits an area, and it introduced character-exclusive Special Items. Mario Kart Wii added the Mega Mushroom, the Thundercloud and the POW Block. Mario Kart Tour brought the Ice Flower, the Coin Box and the Dash Ring.

  Holding two items at once was a Double Dash feature that then vanished for years. It only returned with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.

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• 4. A Gimmick Per Generation

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  Mario Kart 64 gave the series 3D graphics and four-player racing. It also added mini-turbos, which made drift boosts easier to pull off, along with slipstreaming, and it removed coins. Its Extra Mode flipped every track from left to right, and later games renamed it Mirror Mode.

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• 5. Modes and Battles

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  In Grand Prix, players run through cups of four courses, though Super Mario Kart used five. Before Mario Kart 8 there were four difficulties: 50cc, 100cc, 150cc and Mirror Mode. Mario Kart 8 added 200cc as a fifth. Points come from finishing position, and the placing order carries over as the next starting grid. At the end of a cup, the top three players take bronze, silver and gold trophies. From Super Circuit onward, drivers also earn a performance rank, from three stars down to one, and then from A down to E.

  Time Trials send a player around a course alone. The best run is saved as a ghost to race against later. Double Dash!! introduced Staff Ghosts, which were set by members of Nintendo's own development team.

  Online play has run through the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, Nintendo Network and Nintendo Switch Online. Players are matched by a VS Rating for races and a Battle Rating for battles. Each is a number between 0 and 99,999, or 9,999 in Mario Kart Wii. Points rise or fall with performance, and the game tries to pair similar ratings.

  Battle mode has the messiest naming history in the series. In the most common version, balloon battle, each player starts with three balloons and loses one per hit. In Mario Kart 64, a defeated player in a game of three or more became a Mini Bomb Kart that could pop other players' balloons. Super Circuit swapped that for Bob-ombs that respawn after exploding. Double Dash!! added Shine Thief, in which players fight over a Shine Sprite from Super Mario Sunshine before a timer ends, and Bob-omb Blast, in which they throw Bob-ombs to take points. Mario Kart DS followed with Shine Runners, which the source takes care to distinguish from Shine Thief. Mario Kart Wii added Coin Runners, and it changed balloon battle so that players respawn after losing their balloons. Mario Kart 8 kept only balloon battle, staged on a handful of race courses, and the Deluxe edition added Renegade Roundup.

  Mario Kart World introduced Knockout Tour, a race across an open world with 24 players and six checkpoints, where the last four players are eliminated each time a checkpoint is passed. DS-style missions return as P-Switches scattered around the map. Most of its new characters had previously appeared as course hazards. At launch it had no 200cc option, which was expected to arrive in a later update.

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• 6. Verdicts and Sales

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  Nintendo Power named Mario Kart one of the great multiplayer experiences, praising the variety of modes. Not every entry fared so well with critics. Nintendo World Report called Super Circuit the Mario Kart game with the fewest innovations, and critics tied that to the limits of the Game Boy Advance. GamesRadar said the scarcity of the Link Cable made its multiplayer less memorable. Kotaku described it as "lost" next to the pioneering first and second games. Still, critics rank it among the best Game Boy Advance titles.

  Double Dash!! split opinion more sharply. Nintendo Power gave it a perfect score and praised "3-D perfection". Others pointed to the seven-year gap since Mario Kart 64. A GameSpot reviewer named Davis was "a little disappointed with the limited scope". IGN's Mirabella called it a "mediocre effort", and GameRevolution's G-Wok found the track design "bland".

  Super Mario Kart earned a Player's Choice release after selling one million copies, and it finished with 8.76 million worldwide, the fourth-best seller on the Super Nintendo. In Japan it topped the charts in September 1992 and reached 3.82 million. In Europe it led sales in the first quarter of 1993, ahead of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Streets of Rage 2. Mario Kart 64 sold 9.87 million, second on the Nintendo 64 behind Super Mario 64, and passed one million in the United States within two months.

  Mario Kart Wii sold 37.38 million, the second-best total in the series and second on the Wii behind Wii Sports. Mario Kart DS sold 23.6 million, the best of any handheld entry, and Mario Kart 7 reached 18.98 million. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe sold 459,000 units in the United States on its first day. It has since reached 70.59 million copies, the highest on the Switch, against 8.46 million for the Wii U original. Mario Kart World sold 782,566 physical copies in Japan in four days and had sold 14.03 million worldwide by the 31st of December 2025.

  The overall totals are quoted as anywhere from 189 million to 206 million copies, making Mario Kart the most successful racing franchise ever. Guinness World Records lists six records for the series, including longest-running kart racing franchise. It ranked Super Mario Kart first among its top 50 console games, and the original entered the World Video Game Hall of Fame in 2019.

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• 7. Karts That Never Raced

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  VB Mario Kart was scheduled for the Virtual Boy in 1995. The world only learned of it in 2000, through an issue of the German gaming magazine The Big N. Nintendo cancelled it early in development, before any official announcement, after the Virtual Boy failed commercially.

  Mario Kart XXL was a Game Boy Advance tech demo made in 2004 by Denaris Entertainment Software for Nintendo. It began life as a non-Mario demo called R3D-Demo and was later repurposed with Mario Kart branding. A ROM of the demo resurfaced online in 2022.

  Mario Motors was a planned Nintendo DS spin-off built around letting players construct their own karts. Yoot Saito was going to co-develop it. The project was first revealed publicly at the Reboot Development Conference in 2018, long after the DS era had passed.

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• 8. Beyond the Screen

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  In September 2016, Nintendo filed an objection against MariCar, a Japanese company renting road-modified go-karts and character costumes to tourists in Tokyo. MariCar's English website had even warned customers not to throw "banana peels" or "red turtle shells". Nintendo argued the name was "intended to be mistaken for or confused with" Mario Kart, pointing to Japanese shortenings like Pokémon and Sumabura. In January 2017 the Japan Patent Office dismissed the objection. Nintendo then sued in February 2017 over unauthorized costumes, and in September 2018 MariCar was ordered to stop and pay ¥10 million.

  The Mario Kart: Bowser's Challenge ride anchors the Super Nintendo World areas at Universal Studios Japan, Universal Studios Hollywood and Universal Epic Universe. It combines augmented reality with dark ride sets and passes through Mario Kart 8 settings, including Rainbow Road. The Japanese park adds a shop called Mario Motors and a stand named Pit Stop Popcorn.

  Formula E added an attack mode from its 2018-19 season. A driver who takes an alternate lane, highlighted on television with augmented reality graphics, earns a temporary speed boost. The press and series CEO Alejandro Agag have both said it was inspired by Mario Kart.

  Merchandise has ranged widely. McDonald's put Mario Kart 8 toys in Happy Meals in 2014, and the 2018 Monopoly Gamer used Mario Kart 8 courses as its properties. Hot Wheels released car and track sets in 2019. Cold Stone Creamery sold a Rainbow Road ice cream cake from the 30th of September to the 15th of December 2020. Club Nintendo even issued a Mario Kart Wii-themed stopwatch.

  Competitive play centres on Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, though Nintendo markets it as a party game. Players study kart combinations, character traits and track shortcuts, and Nintendo Switch Online, introduced in 2018, supports regional tournaments. Twitch and YouTube have made the scene more visible. Academics note that such scenes can grow from players organizing themselves online rather than from developer-run leagues, as they have here, outside the esports world of League of Legends and Counter-Strike.

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