Picture a nice cool basement in the summer. You’ve just gotten back from the pool, your dad popped you a bag of popcorn and uncorked two glass bottle cokes. You pop in Mario Kart: Double Dash into your GameCube, toss your younger brother a controller, and team up as DK and Diddy to take on the 16 course gauntlet. Your goal? First place.
Picture your best friend’s upstairs playroom. You’ve got a pizza and don’t plan on doing any slumbering at this slumber party. You take a slice and select Toad, cause he’s the fastest. You swerve through moles on Moo Moo Farms using the green N64 controller you don’t have at home but you really want to ask for for Christmas.
Picture a college dorm room. It’s your first time on your own in a new school but a kid on your floor has a Wii . You’re handed your first ever shitty beer and you join a crowd that’s packed into the room and surround a small screen. The second the first blue shell is thrown, someone spills a beer in anger, and you all laugh and immediately start bonding.
The Mario Kart franchise feels baked into modern nostalgia at this point. With so many iterations over the past 30ish years, everyone from your hard core gamer friends to your parents and even grandparents likely have some positive memories with the games. Or at least they have good memories of the times they had playing it with you. And while sentimental blindness can certainly lead to stagnation, Mario Kart feels different. There’s something so wholesome, innovative, and cheerful about booting up to see a cast full of colorful characters race on immaculately designed courses.
But if the essence of this franchise is still a lot of bottled nostalgia, Mario Kart World pops the top off that bottle, and offers a flood of those joyous discoveries, victories, and delights we’ve always craved out of this franchise.
From the start of Mario Kart World there are so many little references to its own heritage. There are 14 remixed tracks, returning vehicles, and even the controversial Donkey Kong redesign that harkens back to 80s arcade cabinets. Mechanically its jump and grind mechanics, while new, do feel like the logical next step in progression from the spinning and wall attach gimmicks of Mario Kart 8. It’s still very much a Mario Kart game, but if these were the only improvements or changes, we would’ve had a pretty darn good new sequel.
But Mario Kart World in many ways goes above and beyond those standard expectations. It doesn’t just feel how you remembered those races growing up. It capitalizes on providing the game that you always dreamed it could be.
The open world is gargantuan, filled with push blocks and secret challenges. Some challenges are simpler, where players run 3 laps on a small version of an SNES track like Koopa Troopa Beach, or gather 8 blue coins while dodging between stray cows. The more complicated missions will have you navigating a series of grinds on a railroad track, tactically using a star to speed through an otherwise unsurpassable swamp, or in my favorite example, boarding a seaplane and jumping off at just the right time to reach the goal.
While games like Mario Kart DS toyed with these ideas to some success, this new iteration goes so far above and beyond what was capable. These are the sort of challenges we would’ve invented as kids in our wildest playground gossip dreams.
But of course the open world is also an answered prayer to those who played Mario Kart 64 and realized they could drive around the castle on Royal Raceway. This small easter egg turned into Mario Kart World’s vast exploration that’s filled to the brim with small delights that had me tearing up from experiencing the first pure joy I’d felt from a game in quite some time.
Cruising around Salty Salty Speedway, an Amalfi coast inspired seaside town, I discovered I could hop on a Ferry Boat and cruise around the harbor taking in the evening lights. Similar, just cruising between locations added this rich sense of the endless possibilities you feel on a road trip.
All this to say the tracks themselves are still just as incredible. I found myself giddily oohing and awing on my first race of DK Spaceport, a 6 tiered industrial pipe race inspired by that original DK arcade cabinet title. The barrel throwing and jump mechanics all felt so fresh while still perfectly honoring that heritage. The remix courses like Peach Beach also take a lot of simple loop levels and add various stages and a lot of verticality that make them a lot better than you remember them.
And the game’s iteration of Rainbow Road has 5 unique tiers, each more beautiful than the last. The depth of the rainbow prism graphics are what you only thought would stay in your imagination as you and your friend designed your own tracks. The music so beautiful, it does those iconic 16 bit jingles the true symphonic justice they deserved.
And speaking of that music, the number of genres and covers this game tackles is done with herculean effort that feels as flawless as a greatest hits album of your favorite band. Being a game centered around hitting the open road and exploring, the choice to use harmonica as the definitive instrument of the game and plenty of rockabilly blues feels so inspired. Each track theme is a bop with plenty of Rock ‘n Roll bombast that embattles the player to race with reckless abandon. But some of the best songs here are the more laid back covers you’ll hear pop up on the radio when you’re between courses.
Songs like a calm Kenny G’esque Bossa Nova rendition of the Dire Dire Docks theme, or a jaunty cajun cover of the Puzzle Plank Galaxy tune offer this way to just bask in what makes everything Mario so special. I had an online friend specifically praise the game’s cover of the Mario Land 2 Overworld theme, saying it reminded them of “sitting outside the JC Penny at the mall with my Gameboy waiting for my mom to finish shopping.” There were so many covers that hit me on that same level. Was it any wonder a new song would come on the radio and I’d immediately be struck with a wave verklempt paired with happily tearing eyes?
My emotional reactions to the game really hit their zenith once I’d unlocked the credits. The rolling group of artists and designers next to a road trip style photo album of all these tender moments or big set pieces was enough to get me smiling ear to ear. As I thought the credits came to a close after a gorgeous medley of Mario Kart World’s OST, it whirled back from the main theme into a final orchestral swell of the new Rainbow Road theme (led by that just wailing soulful harmonica). I choked back those happy tears again, only to let out a fuller sob when the final picture had the whole Kart crew labeled “fond memories”, revealed of course on the final musical button.
As I saw that picture, a flash of that basement, that playroom, that college dorm, my brother, my friends, my parents, and my wife sitting next to me on the couch all rushed back and forward through my mind at the same time. Mario Kart really has made us some fond memories. And Mario Kart World is only going to make so many more.
