Every ‘Mario Kart’ Game, Ranked

For all the frustration the chaos of Mario Kart can cause, there’s always been the comfort that the game itself can’t hurt you (unlike your siblings). That all changed with Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit. Released in 2020, Home Circuit is a mixed reality game that turns players’ living room into an IRL course for remote-controlled kart racing.

Utilizing a camera installed on the top of the RC car (which features Mario or Luigi depending on the purchase), Home Circuit lets users see a live feed of the toy’s surroundings on their Nintendo Switch device, overlaying the virtual characters, items, and action in real time. Gameplaywise, it’s a decent enough Mario Kart game, although less fully featured than a mainline entry. The real issue is that the RC component requires plenty of space (or at least a lack of clutter). A solid gimmick that makes for an impressive toy, but when things heat up in Mario Kart, the last thing anyone wants is to see their victory thwarted by physically slamming into an annoyed dog or parent.

After years of desperately trying to bogart mobile-gaming revenue by keeping their IP exclusive to their own handhelds, Nintendo ultimately broke down in the mid-2010s and decided to rake in the cash with games like Pokémon Go (2016) for iOS and Android. In 2019, they made the obvious choice to release a racer with Mario Kart Tour.

In true mobile gaming fashion, Mario Kart Tour is an overly simplified take on an already simple game, relegating controls to basic touch steering as acceleration and boosts are performed automatically by the game’s CPU. Overall, it’s a decent distraction on-the-go, but Tour lacks the depth (although not the polish) of the mainline console and handheld titles. It did, however, introduce a ton of new courses to the franchise, with some based on real-world locations (it’s a tour, after all) — many of which would be upscaled and introduced in Switch’s Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Mario Kart Tour offers a vision of what a full-on live-service Nintendo game could be. Hopefully, that day never comes.

Although the Mario Kart games staked their claim in the Nineties on the SNES and Nintendo 64, the series remained a home console-only endeavor until 2001 with the release of Super Circuit for the Game Boy Advance. Much more powerful than the OG Game Boy, the GBA was able to not just emulate the pixelated visuals of the 1992 original, but create much more detailed and fluid animations for its characters and world. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite enough to live up to its ambition.

Of all the mainline games, Super Circuit sucks the most to play. Although, at first, the controls feel more intuitive than you’d expect, the feeling is quickly hindered by shoddy draw distance that makes anticipating the road ahead (and tight turns especially) extremely difficult. Somehow, despite its upgraded visuals and design, the game plays worse than the SNES classic, which is saying a lot for a title that doesn’t exactly hold up pristinely. Surely, there are people who remember this one fondly, but going back via Nintendo Switch Online’s Game Boy Advance emulator will mostly quell that sense of nostalgia.

Nintendo might’ve made a name for themselves as an arcade heavy-hitter back in the Eighties, but the advent of the NES repositioned the gaming giant as more of an at-home attraction. More modern arcade releases are few and far between from Nintendo, with the Mario Kart series being an exception — which makes sense! Arcades are one of the best ways to experience racing games, with immersive cabinets that house tapered racing chairs, gas pedals, and of course, steering wheels.

Over the course of four releases — Mario Kart Arcade GP (2005), GP2 (2007), GP DX (2013), and GP VR (2017) — Nintendo partnered with arcade staple Bandai Namco to introduce Mario Kart to coin-up consumers. How are they? Well, they’re Mario Kart. While each iteration introduces its own technological gimmick like a photo booth mode or first-person virtual reality racing, they’re slightly watered down versions of the base game that speed up the action (like reducing the lap number to two) while having the novelty of being a carnival-style experience. Playing two-person multiplayer is side-by-side, but it’s mostly bolstered by the excitement of actually finding one of the machines, which are pretty rare and mostly stumbled upon at Dave & Buster’s or your local mall’s Japanese village.

One funny aspect of gaming is that, unlike movies or other media, the original isn’t always best — not by a long shot. Sequelization and iteration work better in gaming often because new hardware allows a good idea to fulfill its potential as the technology evolves. It’s not a given, but such is the case with Super Mario Kart.

Released on the SNES in 1992, Super Mario Kart employed the console’s then-cutting-edge design to create an immersive 3D facsimile of a racetrack utilizing all 2D assets. Characters are pixelated paper cutouts moving in virtual space along a fixed perspective course. The game is credited with popularizing the race cart genre, which is true. Going back today, there’s a certain novelty to seeing where it all began, but the game’s many systems and quirks would be heavily improved upon in just its first follow-up. And yet, a classic is a classic. The more fascinating (and intrusive) part is the game’s split-screen design, which sequesters the racing to the top half of the screen while the entire bottom half is dedicated to showing the full course from an eagle-eyed vantage. Ironically, the game foreshadowed how later versions on the Nintendo DS and 3DS would play with their dual-screen setup.

For a (slightly) younger generation than those who grew up with the first few entries, Mario Kart Wii was likely their first foray into the series. Arriving in 2008 on the cultural juggernaut that was Nintendo’s Wii, the game introduced the system’s motion controls to the mix, for better or worse. Going back to the basics of Mario Kart following its predecessor’s more experimental two-driver format, Mario Kart Wii feels like a step back in many ways. Nintendo wanted to drive home its Wiimote waggling impetus, leaving the game feeling somewhat hampered by the fact that, even though more traditional inputs could be used, the game feels designed to accommodate a lower skill level.

But it isn’t a total bust. With a robust 24-character count and 32 courses, the game felt meaty with plenty of new faces and locales to discover and also utilized online play like the earlier Nintendo DS entry. A perfect dorm daze game for young adults, it ended up selling over 37 million copies — a franchise peak for the time — and cemented the series’ popularity worldwide.

Another middle of the road entry, 2011’s Mario Kart 7 brought the series back to handhelds for the Nintendo 3DS — a somewhat bizarre device looking back, being a small-scale dual-screen platform that utilized stereoscopic 3D to create immersion (read: migraines). After the return-to-basics approach of Mario Kart Wii, the seventh mainline entry felt like a little more of the same, without any revolutionary concepts outside of the device’s own 3D schtick.

Mario Kart 7 introduced the ability for karts to hang-glide and submerge under water, opening up new avenues for racetracks to take — a feature that would continue to be implemented in the next sequel. The game also featured a first-person perspective that could be controlled using the 3DS’ gyroscopic controls, which works somewhat better than what Nintendo had previously attempted with the Wii. But generally speaking, 7 is more of a pitstop than a victory lap.

If you’re considered vaguely old (like born in the Eighties old) Mario Kart 64 strikes an especially nostalgic chord. Released for the Nintendo 64 in 1996, the second entry in the franchise provided the series’ first big leap into the third dimension — mostly. Although its environments and certain assets (like the rainbow-colored item block) are in fact 3D-rendered polygonal shapes, all the characters and weapons are actually just squished 2D models that shift playfully with perspective to give the illusion of depth. While other games of the time like Ridge Racer had truly committed to the bit on 3D, Nintendo opted for a different route with Mario Kart 64, and it’s one that retains a unique charm years later.

The game introduced many of the core mechanics that are now standard in the franchise, like split-screen multiplayer, the ability to drift or use slipstream to gain the upper hand, and categorizing characters by weight class rather than treating each as skin swaps with the same base stats. It also graced the world with the advent of the blue shell, which targets the player in the lead for a surgical strike and has ruined moods collectively for almost 30 years. Seriously, fuck that thing.

After the frustrating experience that was Super Circuit, the second handheld iteration of Mario Kart felt like a godsend. Launched for the Nintendo DS in 2005, Mario Kart DS split the difference between the improved 3D fidelity of the 2001 GameCube entry and the more classic feel of the earlier titles. In many ways, Mario Kart DS feels like the torchbearer for the franchise’s base design, with each game before it feeling more distinct in their aesthetic and controls. Picking up Mario Kart DS now lets you pinpoint exactly where the series began feeling as it does today.

It certainly wasn’t perfect. Although its visuals were impressive for the time and platform, the game was very choppy, and its rubberband AI (the mechanic that makes the losers suddenly reappear with advantage) is at its worst. However, with a strong set of core systems — and being the first entry in the series playable online — Mario Kart DS remains a winner.

Although the fourth entry in the series is now old enough to drink, Double Dash is held in high regard by Nintendo fans. Released for the underappreciated GameCube console, it’s one of the only (or perhaps, the only) iteration to substantially change the basic formula of racing. Rather than using a single racer, players must choose two characters for a full-on bobsled-style experience, swapping between characters at will. The pairings are fun, even among those of different weight classes, and in two-player cooperative mode, the second user is delegated to item dropping while the primary drives.

Given that there are two racers, Double Dash also introduced double item blocks, allowing for two weapons to be held at any time, allowing for deeper strategy as players can plan for how best to dole out pain. Although every subsequent game reverted to the single driver system, the dual blocks continue to appear to this day. It’s a small tweak, but makes a huge difference when, previously, only expert players knew to hang onto half-deployed shells and bananas to gain a second item. Popularizing the multi-item approach leveled the playing field for newcomers.

Until recently, the duology of Mario Kart 8 and its Deluxe re-release would’ve been a shoo-in for the best game in the series. Taking all of the best design elements from previous games, with a sprawling list of playable characters and courses, it’s very much the greatest hits of Mario Kart.

The eighth mainline entry of the franchise sadly landed with a thud in 2014 due to the general public’s complete ignorance of the Wii U’s existence. But its fate wasn’t sealed on Nintendo’s doomed platform, with the game seeing re-release under the Deluxe moniker in 2017 for the much more successful Nintendo Switch. The original version already collected a huge swath of content in one package, but the update added even more and, following multiple downloadable expansions, saw its character count rise to a then-record 42 with a staggering 96 tracks available.

As a core Mario Kart experience, nothing really beats this. It’s the apex of all the franchise’s original gameplay systems and provides everything both new and nostalgic for players of all generations. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing better.

Without some kind of tectonic shift, it would’ve been nearly impossible to top Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. But Nintendo loves to rise to the occasion. A launch title for the new Nintendo Switch 2, Mario Kart World veers the race off the track and into a fully explorable “inter-connected” map in ways that’s more ambitious than simply adding more.

In Free Roam, players can cruise and peruse the multiple regions of the world at their leisure, finding hundreds of challenges, collectibles, and secrets while never even touching a grand prix. But when it comes time to race, the courses are more carefully curated, each track weaving together throughout the game’s topography for a novel and immersive journey. In Grand Prix, that means each cup consists of levels geographically connected on the larger map, but it really shines in Knockout Tour — a battle royale-esque spin on Mario Kart that sees 24 players race to the death, into the areas that link courses and all, with the bottom-placed competitors being cut round after round.

Gameplaywise, it’s familiar, but new tricks like the Charge Jump and wall riding afford players new tools to get the upper hand. To accommodate the increase to 24 players, the tracks themselves are larger and more epic, with branching paths and wide lanes that let pockets of chaos erupt in the periphery. It’s like a children’s take on the climactic sequence in Mad Max: Fury Road in the palm of your hand. It doesn’t take much to make a Mario Kart game good, but with a realignment of values and some extra ambition, Nintendo has managed to make the best one.