In Japan, though, it was actually the best-selling Super Famicom title, according to VG Sales. Super Mario Kart sold 8.7 million copies for the SNES, which put it fourth on the system behind Super Mario World, Super Mario All-Stars, and Donkey Kong Country. Before that happened, though, Nintendo had successfully planted their flag in the world of kart racing, Sega had missed an opportunity, and the genre took off from there.
By that point, Mario Kart 64 was already two years old, and we already considered kart racers to be cartoony like Power Drift, but to also include weapons and items.ĭon’t worry, Sega eventually got into mascot-based kart racing with weapons and items and chaos, too, and you’ll find people who prefer the Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing games to Mario Kart, even. A Sega CD port, too, but guess what happened to that one? Power Drift finally released on a Sega home console in 1998, a decade after its appearance in arcades, as part of a Sega Ages collection on the Saturn. A 32x version was in development, but went unfinished. A Genesis port was planned, but never came to fruition. Power Drift, though a success in its own right, didn’t take off in the way Super Mario Kart did, possibly in part because of how Sega itself treated the game on the home console market. Sega’s 1988 arcade racer Power Drift featured go karts, cartoony graphics, as well as more fantastical racing courses than the world was used to at the time - cars driving on roller coaster-esque roads wasn’t exactly the norm in ‘88.
Super Mario Kart, released in 1992, was not the first kart racer by any means, but it is understandably the one that kicked off the genre as we know it. Except for that one you’re thinking of, anyway, that game sucks.
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Lots of great Nintendo games didn’t make the top 101! Failure to crack the top 101 does not mean I think the game in question stinks. That’s not the same thing as saying that progenitor Kart isn’t great itself, though. Super Mario Kart didn’t make it for another reason, albeit a simple one: Nintendo has made lots and lots of great games over the years, and more than 101 of them are greater than Super Mario Kart. Mario Kart 64, of course, did not make it into the Nintendo top 101 rankings given my lack of affinity for it, and the fact that Nintendo improved on its conception and execution of “Mario Kart, but in 3D” with every entry that followed only made it that much more obvious of a call for me. It was faster, the gameplay was smoother, and while it was just a two-player experience, it all felt so good to play that it didn’t much matter to me that I couldn’t play with friends the same way I could play Kart 64. There are a few reasons for that, but the main one was that I had already spent quite a few years playing its predecessor, Super Mario Kart, on the Super Nintendo. If you’re newer around here, well, I enjoyed that it was designed for four players, which made for some fun get togethers with pals, but other than that, the game just didn’t do it for me. If you’ve been with this newsletter for some time now, then you likely know how I feel about Mario Kart 64.
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Previous entries in this series can be found through this link. This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter.