Collection essentials #266: Super Mario Kart (SNES)

And now for another hugely influential game that started a series that you probably know about even if you’re not a gamer. It’s Mario Kart!

Go karts were a great idea for a mascot racing game, since the characters are all plainly visible during the race, so that immediately helped this game’s appeal. Different characters have different attributes too for things like acceleration and handling. But Nintendo figured that this game ought to have more than just likable mascots to stand out in the racing genre. So they threw in something that would spice up the gameplay bigtime: items! It’s the big thing Mario Kart is known for. When you drive over an item box (which in this case are a series of yellow squares on the track itself), a roulette occurs in the window of your screen that winds up giving you a random item. These items may help you, like the mushroom which gives you a brief burst of speed, but most of them have to do with messing up your opponents. The best examples are the turtle shells which you can throw. Green shells go straight forward and then ricochet off walls (watch out that you don’t get hit by your own!) while red shells home in on the next racer. This item system makes for a wild fun and dynamic gameplay that can cause the tides of a race to turn many times in a given race, sometimes dramatically.

What does the very first Mario Kart game have to offer? Well, there are four grand prix cups with five short tracks each, in which racers do five laps, and there are different engine classes which function as difficulty levels and control how fast the karts go. Different modes include grand prix, two-player match race, time trial and battle. Grand prix is for one or two players, with a total of eight racers (minimum six computer racers) competing in all the tracks of a given cup trying to accumulate the most points. Match race is just you racing a friend with no computer opponents, any track you like. Time trial is one person racing alone trying for a best time in a chosen track. And battle mode is a special multiplayer mode within a few different battle areas where players drive around finding items with which to hit the opposing player three times total.

Something about this game that I’ve always found interesting is how the computer-controlled racer AI works. In a grand prix, those racers are “ranked” depending on which character you picked (for example, playing as Bowser means Mario will be the fastest computer opponent), and they will all race in sort of a single-file line, not really changing their positions at all unless you mess with them. If you knock one of them out of position with an item, they will drive furiously fast to get back to their position, then just resume whatever speed they were going before, even if it was an unremarkable position like 5th place. It’s so odd! The computer is also notorious for cheating, being able to use items basically whenever they feel like it, and with some characters having access to items that are never available to the player.

Super Mario Kart is certainly not as great as the future games in the series. The fact that you’re limited to only two players at once is probably reason enough, since the sequels expanded that number to four, which is how the game is best enjoyed. The tracks are all entirely flat due to the limitations of the SNES hardware. But that doesn’t mean the original game is totally obsolete or not worth playing. The controls feel different than in the sequels, so it might prove fun to try a game that feels a little different. This game is also more challenging than most other Mario Kart games, and while some may find it frustrating, I think fully beating this game gives a special sense of accomplishment due to the amount of effort it takes.

This game was a huge success and was one of the best-selling SNES games. It basically spawned an entire sub-genre of racing games, as the “mascot kart racer” has become something that many developers have tried their hand at. With every single one of them, it’s blatantly obvious that they’re borrowing from Mario Kart. And while these games are sometimes fun, they almost never actually contest the supremacy of Nintendo’s own wonderful series. And even though Super Mario Kart sold very well, future installments would prove to be even more popular. We’ll get to those in due time.

As a kid, we didn’t have Super Mario Kart when it was brand new, but to no surprise I had opportunities to play it at other peoples’ houses. And before too long, probably sometime in the late ‘90s, my mom grabbed one at a yard sale. That copy lives at my parents’ house to this day, while the one shown is one I got in a great Craigslist SNES deal in 2012. I actually have more memories of playing this game single-player than multiplayer, though I’m sure I did race family members at times. Eventually as a young adult I fully beat the game, conquering every grand prix on 150cc difficulty, and that felt awesome. Even though I prefer future Mario Karts, this one is still plenty of fun and a definite essential.