Feature: Super Mario Kart At 30: How 16-Bit Limitations Created A Franchise-Defining Mechanic
The gift of the drift.
The landscape of the Mario Kart series looks very different today than it did back in 1992 when Super Mario Kart was released for the Super NES. Of course, there is a clear improvement with respect to visuals and we now have new characters, karts, and courses dropping all the time thanks to the Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Booster Course Pass releases and Mario Kart Tour on mobile. Yes, there’s now an official Mario Kart game on non-Nintendo hardware — what a world we live in! However, at its heart, Nintendo’s top racing franchise is today very much the same game that it was 30 years ago.
Across the titles in the Mario Kart series, each entry has had to work, naturally, within the technical boundaries of its respective console. As with any video game, the development of new ideas is a balancing act between what new hardware can bring to the table — be it two or four-person multiplayer, fully 3D character models, online multiplayer, AR racing, the list goes on — versus the realities and restrictions of that hardware. No more so was this the case than in the franchise-opening SNES title, which managed to spin a positive from a hardware limitation by introducing a mechanic which would go on to define the franchise’s style of racing: the humble drift.
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