No video game genre divides and unifies us like the kart racer. For every Mario Kart there are a dozen by-the-numbers cash-ins, and even that hallowed series receives regular criticism as too derivative. But while we all breathe a collective sigh of disappointment with each kid-friendly license that predictably goes the generic kart-racing route, it's hard not to get excited by that rare entry that feels fresh and new.

A great kart racer is a joyous thing. It's accessible yet deep, fun yet primed for oh-so-serious competition between friends, and full of colorful, wacky charm. It is a game for everyone. So in keeping with the spirit of the genre—and as the latest edition in our gaming genre history series that includes city builders, graphic adventures, and simulation games—it's time to ride through the ups and downs of kart racing.

(Before we start, a quick note: I've omitted go-kart racing sims such as Open Kart and Michael Schumacher Racing World Kart because they are essentially conventional racing games and not what we normally think of as kart racers.)





Mario Circuit 1

While all kart racers can of course be traced back to the beginnings of racing games at large, the first appearance of combat—a staple of this subgenre—appears to be in Taito's 1976 arcade game Crashing Race. Details are scarce, but it appears to have been a two-player race to take out as many other cars as possible (a la Criterion's Burnout series). Top-down racing games with on-track hazards, temporary upgrades, missiles, and/or more inventive track designs—such as Super Cars (1990), Turbo Kart Racer (1991), and Micro Machines (1991)—may have also been an influence.

Even earlier than that trio, Namco's Pole Position (1982) didn't have combat but is relevant. It led to Nintendo's early Famicom game F-1 Race (1984), which was programmed by the late company president, Satoru Iwata, and early Super Nintendo game F-Zero (1990)—the futuristic racer that introduced the world to Mode 7, a hardware feature that quickly scales and rotates 2D sprites (with affine transformations) to give the illusion of 3D tracks.

After the success of F-Zero, Nintendo turned its attention to a two-player Mode 7 racing game. But the Super Nintendo couldn't handle F-Zero speeds in a multiplayer Mode 7 game, so it used go-karts instead of futuristic race cars. An early prototype had just one item—you could use oil cans to cause the other driver to spin out. Then the team decided to put Mario in one of the karts, and so followed a Mario-themed racing game—or rather a procession that you and a friend could disrupt by not staying in your designated position(s). By skillfully and imaginatively combining tropes from platformers—power-ups, coins, obstacles to avoid, limited lives, enemies trying to kill you—with those of racing games, the team invented a new genre.

























Super Mario Kart (1992) was like nothing we'd ever seen. You could accomplish gravity-defying hops across chasms, get pancaked beneath a thwomp in a Bowser's Castle track, give that jerk Luigi what's coming to him, and use a variety of Mario-styled power-ups—mushrooms gave a speed boost, stars made you invincible, green and red shells could take out rival karts, and so on. There was a brilliant arena-based, one-on-one battle mode, themed courses that looked as though plucked directly from the Mushroom Kingdom, and an infamously difficult, psychedelic track called Rainbow Road that was the perfect coda to a game that prided itself on tight design coupled with colorful graphics and tense races. To win a Grand Prix race on Rainbow Road on the super-fast 150cc difficulty was to prove your total mastery of the game in its entirety.

As with all genre-defining games, Mario Kart was quickly cloned. Sega was first out of the gate with Sonic Drift on the Game Gear, which offered nothing new beyond a chance to play on a (semi-)portable screen, followed closely by Ubisoft's Street Racer (first on the SNES in 1994, then everything else in 1996). The latter had parallax scrolling backgrounds, a smoother frame rate, and larger karts plus a strange but really cool Rocket League precursor in which you competed with seven other karts to put a soccer ball in a goal.

Elsewhere, Miracle Designs released Atari Karts (1995) on the ill-fated Atari Jaguar console. Apogee (of Duke Nukem fame) published Beavis Soft's Wacky Wheels in 1994 for DOS with graphics and design that at first glance looked ripped straight out of Super Mario Kart (only somehow the fun mostly disappeared in the process). And Copysoft ripped off an early version of Wacky Wheels to create the even more blatant (and bad) shareware ripoff Skunny Kart in 1993. (They were approached as a potential publisher and given early source code, which they had no qualms about releasing as their own with only minor modifications.)