Retro spotlight: Super Mario Kart
Retro spotlight: Super Mario Kart
The game that helped kick off what is now nearly 30 years of kart racing video games is still plenty of fun itself.
This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
If you’ve been with this newsletter for some time now, then you likely know how I feel about Mario Kart 64. If you’re newer around here, well, I enjoyed that it was designed for four players, which made for some fun get togethers with pals, but other than that, the game just didn’t do it for me. There are a few reasons for that, but the main one was that I had already spent quite a few years playing its predecessor, Super Mario Kart, on the Super Nintendo. It was faster, the gameplay was smoother, and while it was just a two-player experience, it all felt so good to play that it didn’t much matter to me that I couldn’t play with friends the same way I could play Kart 64.
Mario Kart 64, of course, did not make it into the Nintendo top 101 rankings given my lack of affinity for it, and the fact that Nintendo improved on its conception and execution of “Mario Kart, but in 3D” with every entry that followed only made it that much more obvious of a call for me. Super Mario Kart didn’t make it for another reason, albeit a simple one: Nintendo has made lots and lots of great games over the years, and more than 101 of them are greater than Super Mario Kart. That’s not the same thing as saying that progenitor Kart isn’t great itself, though. Lots of great Nintendo games didn’t make the top 101! Failure to crack the top 101 does not mean I think the game in question stinks. Except for that one you’re thinking of, anyway, that game sucks.
Super Mario Kart, released in 1992, was not the first kart racer by any means, but it is understandably the one that kicked off the genre as we know it. Sega’s 1988 arcade racer Power Drift featured go karts, cartoony graphics, as well as more fantastical racing courses than the world was used to at the time — cars driving on roller coaster-esque roads wasn’t exactly the norm in ‘88. Power Drift, though a success in its own right, didn’t take off in the way Super Mario Kart did, possibly in part because of how Sega itself treated the game on the home console market. A Genesis port was planned, but never came to fruition. A 32x version was in development, but went unfinished. A Sega CD port, too, but guess what happened to that one? Power Drift finally released on a Sega home console in 1998, a decade after its appearance in arcades, as part of a Sega Ages collection on the Saturn. By that point, Mario Kart 64 was already two years old, and we already considered kart racers to be cartoony like Power Drift, but to also include weapons and items.
Don’t worry, Sega eventually got into mascot-based kart racing with weapons and items and chaos, too, and you’ll find people who prefer the Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing games to Mario Kart, even. Before that happened, though, Nintendo had successfully planted their flag in the world of kart racing, Sega had missed an opportunity, and the genre took off from there.
Super Mario Kart sold 8.7 million copies for the SNES, which put it fourth on the system behind Super Mario World, Super Mario All-Stars, and Donkey Kong Country. In Japan, though, it was actually the best-selling Super Famicom title, according to VG Sales. Its success helped lead to Mario becoming more than just a mascot in name for Nintendo, too. Basically, you can thank Super Mario Kart for the plumber’s forays into other non-platforming genres, and since I am a person who loves not just Mario Kart but also Mario sports games in general, I will do that. Thanks, Super Mario Kart!
What I’m really thankful for with Super Mario Kart, though, is the game itself. It might seem archaic in some ways, since we’re so used to the franchise as a 3D racer at this point, but Super Mario Kart is great in ways you don’t need to attach “for the time” to in order to justify. While you’re limited to just eight racers and four types of racers, the differences in these four types are so significant that the game plays very differently depending on who you’ve selected. Mario and Luigi are well-rounded racers, as per usual, but Yoshi and the Princess have excellent acceleration and low top speeds, Bowser and Donkey Kong Jr. feature horrendous acceleration but the greatest top speeds in the game, and while Koopa Troopa and Toad don’t have exceptional acceleration nor top speed, they have the greatest handling of anyone in Kart. Weight does play a role in this early Mario Kart title, too: Bowser is able to basically launch Koopa and Toad off course in a collision, while Yoshi and Peach are able to better withstand a crash with the big guys.
You’ll want to play around with the different types of racers for a while to figure out what feels just right: historically, I’ve leaned toward Koopa and Bowser, with far more hours put into the former. I might race a heavy now, but I race a heavy who can handle thanks to kart customization: the handling on Bowser and DK Jr. is purposefully garbage in comparison, or else why would you ever use anyone besides the brutes with the game’s superior top speeds?
The Mode 7 graphic capabilities of the SNES are put on full display in Super Mario Kart: Mode 7, if you’re unaware or just want a refresher, allowed backgrounds to be rotated and scaled in such a way that they could create the impression of three dimensions. It was utilized in a number of your favorite SNES games, basically regardless of genre: Mode 7 played a significant role in JRPGs from Squaresoft, in action and simulation games from Quintet, and in plenty of Nintendo’s own creations, like Pilotwings, F-Zero, and Super Mario Kart.
Mode 7 allowed for the kind of graphical tricks and pseudo-3D that arcade games had been able to utilize for some time on their more powerful hardware, but those tricks weren’t the norm on home consoles. Not until the SNES made them so, anyway: while the Sega Genesis did not have any comparable effect to Mode 7, Sega made sure that the systems add ons, the 32x and Sega CD, did. It was probably a better plan than just saying “blast processing!” again and again.
The game’s weapons and items systems work a bit differently than in all other Mario Kart titles. The human players are the only ones who can pick up items, which will all look pretty familiar to anyone who has played any edition of Mario Kart. There is no blue shell yet, but bananas, shells, speed-boosting mushrooms, and even the lightning bolt and Boo power-ups are already here. Coins, too, work like you think they would, with more of them meaning a higher top speed: if you don’t have any coins, you will spin out every time someone bumps into you, so make sure you are prioritizing coins to some degree. Your computer-controlled opponents are not helpless even if they can’t acquire power-ups like you: they have their own special item that can be deployed basically whenever they feel like. Peach throws mushrooms on the course that will shrink you if you collide with them. Donkey Kong Jr. can leave bananas lying around. Mario and Luigi can power-up with a star whenever they goddamn feel like it, meaning they are unable to be damaged by you but will cause you to spin out if you crash into them.
Each character has a specific lineup of opponents to contend with. Every time you race as Koopa Troopa, for example, Luigi will be your rival for the number one slot, Yoshi will be primed to come in second, and so on. This order can be altered during the first course — say Luigi spins out near the end of the first race and finishes in fifth place instead of first or second, which would make Yoshi your new contender for the top spot and Mario now in the top four — but is otherwise basically set in stone. It’s how the rubber banding works: your opponents can go down, but are not out until the race ends. So, delay Luigi with a well-placed shell or banana to get a bit of breathing room as Koopa, but just know that the green-clad plumber will be right up your ass again soon enough, probably while utilizing his star in his quest for revenge against you. Some people dislike this mode: I like to think it adds a bit of a personal touch, in that I revel in defeating Luigi or whomever specifically, and there is nothing quite like the feeling of mathematically eliminating your nemesis in the cup by taking them down with an item very late in a race.
Scoring in general works differently in Super Mario Kart. You only earn points by finishing in one of the first four positions — nine points for first, six for second, three for third, and one for fourth. If you finish fifth through last, you lose an extra life. You have three lives, and can earn a fourth by finishing in the same position three races in a row: once you run out of lives, you’ve failed the cup in question. If you’re about to finish in fourth place in single player, you’re probably better off hitting the brakes and finishing in fifth, then using an extra life to try again.
In addition to all of these very game-specific rules, there is a shocking amount of depth in this game, considering how short even racers from the next generation of games could be in terms of course selection: the three difficulty levels you’re used to (50cc, 100cc, and 150cc) are already all here, and there are four different cups to play through, with five courses each. While you don’t go particularly fast in 50cc, in a way that makes Super Mario Kart feel extremely slow in comparison to other racers of the time period, that’s all fixed by the time you unlock 150cc by securing gold in each of the 100cc cups. Once you get the hang of 150cc, you’ll find yourself putting up some eye-opening times. I’ll just go ahead and say the obvious, but what this player is pulling off in the video below isn’t something you can just do without playing like, so much Super Mario Kart:
The game’s very first course, for instance, is Mario Circuit 1. On 50cc, it’s a very basic, slow-moving course, one that is short and meant to get you used to the ideas of the game in general: that you can pick up items from question mark blocks on the ground, that driving off-road will slow you down, that crashing into obstacles like pipes or walls is a problem, etc. On 150cc, it can be played as a real race against time instead of just your opponents. If you manage to boost off of the starting line, you can complete all five laps in under a minute. There’s a reason Nintendo moved away from five laps and five courses per cup to three and four, respectively, and it’s because the courses and the laps of them became larger and longer. Here, though, the emphasis is on speed and repeatedly making it through the many threats and obstacles around and in front of you, and if you can’t figure out how to pull off a particularly tough turn or jump, you aren’t going to come in first on the higher difficulties, not when you have to go by that problem area five times.
When you’ve finished with the four cups on three difficulties and have placed first in all of them, there is still plenty to do in Super Mario Kart, even without the star-ranking system or four-player (or more) multiplayer, both of which would be introduced in later entries. Given how Super Mario Kart was a bit more focused on speed and comparatively realistic racing to later Mario Kart releases, the time trials are particularly engaging. It’s not just about finding a shortcut that will work to cut down on your time, but also making the racing game equivalent of pixel-perfect jumps. Drifting isn’t exactly how you know it from the Mario Kart games that followed, but it’s still here in some form, helping you take hard and tight turns at exceptional speeds: and, if you overdo a drift, you’ll spin out as if you’ve just been struck by a projectile. There’s a real feel to it, and you’ll catch yourself getting into a rhythm that allows you to blow away your old times as you practice as you perfect when to start and stop your drifts.
If all you have is an SNES, well, let’s hope you still have a copy of Super Mario Kart, or else you’re looking at spending $40-50 or maybe more on a cartridge. It’s not a rare game by any means, not when it sold nearly nine million copies, but it is nearly 30 years old at this point. If you managed to pick up an SNES Classic before Nintendo discontinued that gem, Super Mario Kart is on there. And if you’re part of the tens and tens of millions of people with a Nintendo Switch, it’s also available on the SNES portion of the Nintendo Online service, either as a game you can play from the start, or modified a bit so that every cup and difficulty is already unlocked for you to play. If you’ve never experienced what ended up being a pretty unique take on Mario Kart given the direction the series went in — even the Game Boy Advance Mario Kart release, Super Circuit, often feels more like the 3D entries despite looking like its 2D predecessor — then you should give it a shot. It might not be your thing! But if you end up enjoying it, well, it’s been nearly three decades, and I’m still having a lot of fun with the fake 3D and competing against my own times all these years later.
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