The Evolution Of Mario Kart - My Life With Nintendo's Iconic Racer

What was the first game you ever got when you got your first console? I imagine that title stuck with you for life, right, a game that you always go back to time and time again to relax and reminisce over?

I can still remember getting my N64 on Christmas Day, 1997, and opening up my very first game - Mario Kart 64. My mother had asked my cousin to test it out for her ahead of the big day to make sure that everything worked properly, and was quietly hoping that he had successfully erased all of the data so that I A) didn't think that Santa wasn't real, or B) that Santa had been ditching his duties to the other children buy taking Yoshi around Bowser's Castle in the small hours of the morning.

Mario Kart has been with me through every stage of my gaming life on every console, even the ones I bought later for myself after playing on them at friends' or family members' houses. It's been with me through friendships, relationships, through the good times, and the bad. Through periods of being grounded, family holidays, or turbulent times in my life. It's been a constant when friends came round, during family gatherings, and on evenings with loved ones while relaxing after a busy day.

I'm going to dive back into Mario Kart's history, looking at the games that I've grown up with and what made them so special. I'm going to discount Mario Kart Tour and Home Circuit, however, because I have no connection with them, and it doesn't feel right to talk about them in context with the games that have had such a profound effect on me over the years.

I also want to hear from you guys too; our comments section is the perfect place to let me know all about your experiences with this game over the years, which your favourite title is, and much more. Your support for Retro Dodo means a lot to us, as do your opinions!

Super Mario Kart (1992)

'Where racing becomes an adventure'. Never before has a sentence been so enticing, a box so filled with incredible possibilities.

While Super Mario Kart wasn't the first game that I physically owned in the canon, I spent my early years before I got my first console, the N64, playing Mario Kart with my cousin on his SNES. All of the characters I had seen on Super Mario All-Stars led by Nintendo's poster plumber, a character I had spent hours and hours playing as on the Game Boy, now racing in go karts. It was a simple idea, but it's one that has changed my life forever and paved the way for both karting games and, if we're being honest, multiplayer titles in general.

Can you remember the first time you played this game? Whenever I see the levels on my little CRT now or when they pop up on the Switch, they seem so simple in design. I mean, once your mind has been subjected to a cow grinding down a telegraph pole on something called the 'Dread Sled', then I guess there's no wonder. But back in the day, the weapon blocks, the courses, and the general jeopardy were something we'd never seen or experienced before.

They wanted to make a multiplayer karting game that would sit alongside the single-player F-Zero, with F-Zero's programmer Masato Kimura toning down the tracks and speed for a more relaxing, wholesome racing title.

After a few months, they put Mario literally in the driving seat and created one of the most loved and best-selling karting game series of all time. Super Mario Kart felt 3D despite the fact that it lacked the depth to truly be a 3D game. It used something called Mode 7 graphics, a form of texture mapping that allowed developers to create levels that could be rotated and scaled as 2D sprites moved through them to create the illusion of a game being 3D.

So many different franchises have tried to copy this initial formula over the years, slapping other groups of famous characters into Grand Prixs, battle modes, versus races, and time trial modes. None of them has come close to the might of Mario Kart, however.

Ok, Diddy Kong Racing came incredibly close, but I'm just going to omit that for now because today is all about Mazza.

Mario Kart 64 (1996)

What you're looking at here isn't just a tattooed guy in a Joe Hendry t-shirt playing Mario Kart. Ok, that's essentially what you're looking at, but this is my original N64 and my original copy of Mario Kart from back when I was a kid, and both are still going strong today.

Nothing reminds me of the 90s more than Mario Kart 64. I think unwrapping my N64 on Christmas day and plugging into the massive CRT we had in the corner of the room, hooking up the RF Converter, and taking Mario and Yoshi around Moo Moo Farm with my Mum for the first time. I think of my Grandma having a go and getting stuck behind a wall and not knowing how to reverse, and I think of all the hours I spent playing this game with my friends, firing red shells at each other and trying to bash controllers out of each others hands when one of us was winning.

The jump from the 16-bit to 64-bit was extreme. Sure, Super Mario Kart had that 3D feel, but it instantly felt like an ancient game when Mario Kart 64 dropped into our lives. The character sprites were fuller and more rounded, while the courses were more detailed and had greater depth. Weapon blocks were things you could actually drive through, and the pipe frame had exhaust pipes that looked like eyes. It was a dream come true for someone who has lived and breathed Mario games since I first experienced the NES with my Uncle as a child, and I couldn't get enough of it.

Despite it having a 3D feel and widely being heralded as the first 3D game in the series, it still uses a similar technique to Super Mario Kart in respect of having 2D characters kept in line with the camera to create that feeling of it being 3D, though it's much less noticeable than the SNES Mario Kart offering. It meant that Nintendo could have multiple characters on the track at once and keep game memory in check rather than creating something that ran as well as DOOM in a PDF.

Mario Kart: Super Circuit (2001)

Before Super Mario Tour or even the rise of emulators on smartphones or handhelds, Mario Kart: Super Circuit provided us with our portable Mario Kart fix. I had waited so long to be able to take Mario Kart out of the house and into the world with me without having to pack my N64 in a suitcase, something I did a couple of times when we went on holiday to the seaside during rainy periods as a kid, which is pretty much all-year round in England.

Super Mario Kart never left my GBA as a child. It was the ultimate game to have in my pocket, the perfect time killer while waiting for my dinner, and a great game to have a few rounds on before bed/play all night and pretend I was asleep when my parents came to check on me.

Super Circuit was a bit of a hybrid of the previous two games, which makes sense as the GBA was a 32-bit console and sat between the SNES and the N64. The characters looked more like the N64 offering and are undoubtedly where Nintendo put most of their attention to avoid it feeling like we'd backtracked graphically, while the courses were much simpler, like those that we first came across in Super Mario Kart. That's largely down to the return to Mode 7 scaling Intelligent Systems used while making the game and the fact that, once again, the feeling of 3D is being created via that paralax scrolling effect.

But back then, all I cared about was the fact that I could take Yoshi around Cheese Land, Sky Garden, and the 4 Bowser's Castle levels. There were 40 courses in total, taking some of the SNES tracks into account for that nostalgic nod that has become so key in the Mario Kart back catalogue over the years.

Mario Kart: Double Dash!! (2003)

To me, this still feels like the most significant jump in terms of graphics in the series until we get to Mario Kart Deluxe. Ok, I'm not denying that Mario Kart World looks tonnes better than Double Dash; that would be madness. What I'm saying is that the changes from Mario Kart: Double Dash!! to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe feels much more like 'adding in additional features' rather than 'a dramatic change'. Many of my non-gamer friends have looked at World and not realised that it's not 8 Deluxe, for instance, but visually, the jump between the N64 to the rounded characters and fully, undeniable 3D characteristics of the worlds and the karts in DD remains one of the most pivotal changes in the series for me.

Simple gameplay and a gimmick would do the trick - having two characters on karts that you could swap between while racing. Mix and match with heavy and light players, and create your own custom teams that never would have been possible otherwise - Baby Mario & King Boo, if we're going to create the weirdest tag team known to Toadkind.

This was also the first game that brought custom karts into the equation instead of just the Pipe Frame, which is ironically the one vehicle we all strive to unlock and use in every new game. Funny how life works, huh?

I'm going to say something that some of you might instantly disagree with now, however, and that's that I'm just not the world's biggest fan of the main premise of Mario Kart Double Dash!! I get it; two characters on one kart paved the way for four players doing multiplayer races without having to have smaller screens, and the timeless adage of 'two heads are better than one' really was the main selling point here. I just didn't enjoy being the one throwing the items when I could have been driving; you have a whole player taking the job of the Z button, and it just seemed pretty pointless.

That being said, it's the second-best-selling GameCube game for a reason, and I'm not disputing the brilliance of the tracks on this game. There were only 16 to choose from, which seems mad considering how spoilt for choice we've been with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on the Switch. Still, Waluigi Stadium and Baby Park are two of the most iconic tracks out there. And yes, I know Baby Park is just a circle, but it's one of the most intense courses to play with four of your mates, and that's a hill I'll die on any day of the week.

Mario Kart DS (2005)

Initially, my DS was mainly used for playing Super Mario 64 DS and Brain Training on a morning when I woke up. I figured that it would help to keep my brain ready to rumble as I got closer and closer to my GCSE's. But once Mario Kart DS dropped into my life that November, I ditched the brain training and put the pedal to the metal.

The second solely portable title in the canon is undoubtedly my favourite, and I'm covering my back here by saying 'solely' portable because I'm considering the Switch to be in the hybrid category for this article.

I just loved how the gameplay looked, and having the option of having a large map up on the screen at all times was a nice touch. Custom karts, (long live the B-Dasher) and 3D graphics in a game that felt more cloesly linked to Mario Kart 64 stylistically than it did Double Dash - it was the sweet spot for me, which is why I still play it a lot on my phone via Delta and compete to be the best racer in Retro Dodo against Brandon on a regular basis.

It's the first game to feature a set of cups fully made from previous courses too, with tracks from the SNES, N64, GBA, and the GameCube featuring. Playing Choco Mountain and Moo Moo Farm (N64 till I die) online with friends was something else entirely.

Yes, it's easy to forget that this was the first Mario Kart title to have online multiplayer. I can still remember lying back on the sofa (still marvelling that I could get online without having that annoying ringing noise from the dial-up internet) and playing my friends in different villages. I know I've always been a lover of couch multiplayer gaming and did still play locally with other friends that owned a DS when they came over to the house, but it was still very impressive!

Nowadays, the online servers that we used on the DS have long since hung up their hats, which is why Brandon and I play using our iPhones thanks to Riley Testut's wizardry. It's amazing to head back online and play levels that I first came across when I was 15, now I'm 35. 20 years disappear in an instant, until I get up and feel that my back is aching.

Mario Kart Wii (2008)

The one thing that I bet you and I think about whenever someone mentions Mario Kart Wii is those plastic wheels, right? I've spent a lot of time talking about these wheels and the miracle of the Wiimote's motion controls in a dedicated article on how influential this game was, but it still makes me excited to think about the race to the TV to get the two plastic wheels I had. It also makes me wonder why I never bought more, but that's a story for another time.

Making a wheel for the Wiimote was a genius idea, as Miyamoto predicted. He explained in a chat with the late-great Satoru Iwata that whether people drive or not, the steering wheel is such an easy concept for people to understand. It's true that we've all used a wheel at some point in our lives (unless you're a caveman who has been cryogenically frozen and just woken up), whether operating machinery, a car, or playing with a child's toy.

The thing I love the most about Miyamoto's love for the Wii Wheel, however, is that he wanted a bundle that came in a big box again, just like the old days of Lylat Wars arriving in a big box with the Rumble Pak.

Motion controls changed everything in the series from this point onwards; players like my Dad, who turned their hands when they were moving despite it making no difference to their position whatsoever, finally could put their odd actions to good use. Nintendo worked with a company called Gyration over a four-year period to perfect their new motion controls, moving through lots of different variations of the iconic TV remote-style controller that, like the Wii Wheel it sat in, was easy for any gamer to use no matter their ability level or experience.

It's no surprise that it's the second-best-selling Wii game in the catalogue too (a theme that we're picking up on for many consoles here). If it wasn't for Wii Sports shipping with every Wii, then it would have probably taken the top spot, but you won't find any hate for Wii Sports here, so it can keep that accolade.

Like its predecessor on the DS, Mario Kart Wii also brought 32 courses to the table - 16 new, and 16 nostalgic tracks for players to reminisce over. It also had features that couldn't be implemented into the DS game, as well as a better online matchmaking system for online races.

Mario Kart 7 (2011)

Mario Kart 7 and its gliding action might have made my eyes feel like they were being sucked out of my skull after a while of using the 3D function on the console, but it remains one of my favourite games on the 3DS to this date. It's the best-selling title on the console too, largely down to it being bundled with the handheld, but also because it's a perfect example of the Mario Kart formula reaching its zenith.

This game looks like how I imagined Mario Kart 64 to look when I was a kid. It's incredible how much difference 15 years can make in terms of processing power, graphics engines, and developing tools. Gone were the days of billboarding in Mario Kart 64 or the flat coins we saw in Super Circuit, paving the way for incredibly detailed courses.

The kart customisation feature that we relied upon heavily in Mario Kart 8 to get that edge over our opponents first appeared on Mario Kart 7. It also cemented the idea of having a kart that could adapt depending on whether it was airborne or underwater. It was all supposed to make the game more strategic, and it worked well considering the game was kind of thrown together to try and save the Nintendo 3DS from poor sales.

Rather than bringing all of my retro consoles to my dorm room, I relied on Mario Kart 7 to get my Nintendo fix when kicking back in bed. Sure, my Wii was in the living room, but I spent a lot of time just winding back after lectures/hiding from my annoying housemates with this game during that first year. While I've not played it as religiously as the other titles in this list over long periods, it definitely got me through that first year and, more importantly, provided inspiration for the bigwigs at Nintendo for their Mario Kart Wii U debut.

Mario Kart 8 (2014)

I can remember walking down to a shop called Grainger Games with my mum. who had come to visit me and my girlfriend at the time, to pick up a Wii U and Mario Kart 8 bundle. I'd been reading all about the new game and how it implemented all of the mechanics of Mario Kart 7 in a 1080p racing experience like no other.

Considering this game ended up spanning over eleven years, I think we can safely say that it was a success for Nintendo. The mixture of 32 new and old courses that had become such a staple ingredient in the previous games never failed to keep me entertained, especially because all of the old courses had had such a revamp that they felt nostalgic while seeming completely brand new.

I can remember the first time I turned it on and saw Yoshi flying around Sunshine Airport and Cloudtop Cruise, marvelling at the depth to the levels and thinking that the Wii U was surely going to be the best console of all time thanks to this incredible game, the best Mario Kart we had ever had up to this point.

I think we all know that wasn't the case, however...

Anti-gravity segments played a huge part in revamping old courses. I remember thinking 'this is cool, but I'm gonna get bored of this', and then still getting excited every time the wheels folded up and I travelled upside down. Ok, I would have preferred Diddy Kong Racing-esque planes when that happened, and I'll maintain that stance forever, but I loved it nonetheless.

This was the first time I'd had to pay for DLC for Mario Kart too - I remember signing up to get Link and a load of Yoshis in different colours. It was a no-brainer - Link and a Hyrule Course on Mario Kart? Come on, I'm not an idiot.

I think the continuation of Wiimote Support for this game and the fact that we could still pull out the Wii Wheels was awesome. Me and my mates from work (my manager Paul who would be ringing Talk Sport to talk about Blackburn Rovers at the same time and still manage to beat us) would come back and play for hours after a long shift while kicking back with some beers, continuing that couch multiplayer feel that has been such a strong factor throughout my gaming life, a feature that the Wii got so right and the Wii U would have continued had it had the game support.

I've never bought the wheels for the Switch Joycons; I felt like that gimmick died with the 'Wii' branding for me, and the smaller Switch wheels didn't feel as substantial or as exciting. Besides, when you've got a pro controller or a Nitro Deck, everything else feels pointless, right?

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (2017)

Mario Kart 8 might have started out on the Wii U, but it found its home on the Switch. The Booster Pass drip-feeding us characters and courses over the years kept us coming back for more, with a total of 96 tracks to choose from in the end and a character roster that looked like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Unlocking karts and wheels through picking up coins kept things fresh too, providing more combinations than we would ever need (everyone knows that Cyber Slick wheels are the best, right?).

I'm not going to lie - there was a moment when I first turned this game on and thought to myself - it's more of the same. The change from the Wii U to the Switch wasn't dramatic graphically, but ditching the Wii U Gamepad in favour of portable gameplay with the Switch was incredible. That first moment you began a Grand Prix on your TV and then removed the console from the dock to play while kicking back on your sofa was a special one, no doubt about it. And for the first time, I could take a home console version of Mario Kart out of the house and with me around the world.

I can remember playing Mario Kart 8 Deluxe with some Polish girls in the middle of an Italian forest while helping out at a workaway project renovating a church house. Yes, that's such a strange sentence to write down, but there we were, two joycons and the Switch in tabletop mode on the top of a makeshift bench as we took Donkey Kong and Peach around iconic tracks from our youths. It was a great moment, and one that I replicated many times.

You see, back when the Switch released, Retro Dodo's founder Brandon and I ran a Camper Van magazine, and I was living off grid travelling around Europe and America with my trusty Switch in tow. So when I think about Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, I think about playing it everywhere from mountains in France to the shady boughs beside Lake Tahoe. I think out of all the consoles in this list and all the versions of Mario Kart that Nintendo have made, it's the one that's been to most countries with me, the one that i've used consitently for relaxing down.

And the one that made me the most bald.

I know the Wii U had online capabilites, but way more of my friends had a Switch at home, which meant playing online every Friday night. It didn't matter that Tom was in Kansas City or Josh in rainy Yorkshire here in the UK - we could play together wherever, and that was something incredibly special.

Mario Kart World (2025)

Which brings me nicely onto the latest edition of the Mario Kart series that has taken over my life and the reason I wanted to buy a Nintendo Switch 2. Thanks to Game Chat, we've come as close to going 'full circle' back towards that feeling of couch multiplayer gaming that we had back in the days of the SNES and the N64. Now, I can see my friends as though they were right there with me, which is pretty rare for a pick up and play home console that doesn't need you to sign up to a streaming service or attach video capture cards. It's the most immersive multiplayer experience in any home console to date, and I for one am glad I bought the camera with my Switch 2, if only to see Brandon's face whenever I hit him with a red shell.

An open world adventure you can drive around inifintiely, with unlockable characters and skins found through using a wizard powerup or eating takeaway food in pitstops. Challenges, planes instead of gliders, racing on waves, free roam, and being able to play as a Moo Moo - what more could you want?

And the graphics... I never thought that I would say that a Mario Kart game could be beautiful in the same sense as Ghost of Tsushima or God of War Ragnorok having beautiful scenery, but the depth to the deserts and the water levels in this game is incredible.

And if you wondered why we had Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for so long, it's because Nintendo had been working on Mario Kart World since 2017. Creating an open world Mario Kart games took Nintendo eight years, as well as the realisation that the current Switch didn't have enough power to be able to show 24 racers on the screen at once. No matter though; it's here now, and I'm loving discovering all of the challenges and unlockables in the free roam mode that make this game feel as close to Diddy Kong Racing's story mode as possible.

So What's Next?

Honestly, I think we're going to see Mario Kart World sticking around for a long while now. The game took eight years to make, for crying out loud, so I think Nintendo will concentrate on giving us more characters and courses over the coming years to rival the amazing choice on Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw more characters from non-Mario games like Link and Zelda joining the fray, as well as characters like Star Fox and maybe even PAC-MAN.

Nintendo are definitely going to opt for adding to Mario Kart World at this stage rather than going full speed ahead with Mario Kart Universe or Mario Kart Galaxy (although that would be incredible). I would be very surprised if we had two Mario Kart games for the Switch 2, so I think I would get comfortable with World for the time being. That being said, I don't think the game can ever go back to its roots now that it's gone open world either - the days of 3 laps of the same course are over, and the only way I can see Mario Kart going from here on out is to add boss battles in an adventure mode ala Diddy Kong Racing.

Perhaps that will come as DLC on Mario Kart World, who knows. For now though, I'm going to close my laptop and go unlock some more costumes for Wario and Waluigi so I can finally complete the set!

Be sure to let me know about your experiences with Mario Kart in the comments below. We would love to know what this game has meant to you over the years, which your favourite title was, and how you're finding Mario Kart World compared to its predecessors!