At 20 years old, Mario Kart: Double Dash remains one of Mario’s racing best - and it needs to come to Switch

Nintendo is all about reinventing the wheel where it can – and that attitude follows through even to more simple, straightforward genres – like racing games. This has worked for good and for ill – part of the reason why we’re still waiting on more F-Zero is presumably because developers have been unable to come up with an earth-shattering, genre-shaking concept for the series. They don’t want to just make ‘another F-Zero’, so the franchise has been trapped in a prolonged pit stop.

Mario Kart, however, is relatively bullet-proof. Nintendo knows it needs at least one of these on every generation of hardware. It’s one of the most iconic Mario things; even the Hollywood movie goes to great pains to get in a kart racing detour. As part and parcel of that, it’s fair to say that Mario Kart has often been a gently iterative series – new tracks, new items, new modes – but rarely shaking things up on a fundamental level. But… then there’s Double Dash.

Double Dash turns 20 today, having first been released in Japan on November 7, 2003. Double Dash is, I’d argue, the one entry in the Mario Kart series that really embodies the attitude that drives most of Nintendo’s other franchises, experimental in a way that adding hang-gliders and such over the subsequent years rarely gets close to.