Crash Nitro Kart was a serviceable attempt to continue Crash’s karting capers on a new generation of consoles, though developer Vicarious Visions fell short of accurately emulating the original Crash Team Racing’s razor-sharp handling model. It’s not a better game than the original CTR overall, despite the leap in fidelity, but CNK does have some slick circuits to its name (like the tricky Clockwork Wumpa). A bunch of these circuits are being brought to this year’s Crash Team Racing remake, which will allow us to re-experience CNK’s coolest courses with the superior driving dynamics of Naughty Dog’s sublime original. Year: 2000 ● Developer: Melbourne House ● Publisher: Infogrames
Filled with inventive weapons and tough racing, Looney Tunes Space Race focuses squarely on tracks with a sci-fi streak. As a result, it lacks a bit of the environmental variety of sister title Looney Tunes Racing, but its sharp, cel-shaded graphics were a decent showcase for the otherwise doomed Dreamcast at the time. Coincidentally enough, Looney Tunes Space Race (which was first released on Dreamcast in the same month Looney Tunes Racing first hit PlayStation) came out in the same year that also brought us two equally-unrelated Disney-based kart racers (also from different developers). Maybe it’s not a bad thing that the kart racing space is a little less crowded these days. Year: 1999 ● Developer: High Voltage Software ● Publisher: LEGO Media
The aspect of LEGO Racers I loved most as a kid was nothing to do with the racing itself. Yes, dashing around its vibrant, varied collection of tracks collecting all colour of studs was a joy. But it was the vehicle creator that kept me glued to my PC monitor for hours after school. The ability to build a garage-full of karts from LEGO bricks is what stood it apart from other kart racers. Nothing put a smile on my face more than spending an hour designing an Ancient Egyptian-Alien-Pirate hybrid monstrosity to only spend less than five minutes careering around a rainforest to break it all up and start again. Yes, LEGO Racers may not be held high in the pantheon of car handling, but it offered so much more than that. Year: 2000 ● Developer: Crystal Dynamics ● Publisher: Eidos
Back in the year 2000 you couldn’t throw a dart into a games store without hitting a kart racer. Walt Disney World Quest: Magical Racing Tour wasn’t even the only Disney-licensed kart racer to arrive in 2000; Mickey's Speedway USA by Rare arrived on the N64 in the same year. However, while Mickey's Speedway USA was a bit of a step back from Rare’s earlier work with the much-loved Diddy Kong Racing, Walt Disney World Quest: Magical Racing Tour received plenty of props for its charming presentation and robust racing. The courses were all based on stylised versions of famous Disneyland rides, like the Haunted Mansion, the Jungle Cruise, and Pirates of the Caribbean, amongst a bunch of others. You can scoff at its mouthful-of-a-name and antiquated appearance today, but know that it was the next game out of Crystal Dynamics following its critically-acclaimed 1999 cult-fave Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, and it was directed by the same bloke who went on to produce Dead Space and direct Call of Duty: WWII. Year: 2003 ● Developer: Nintendo EAD ● Publisher: Nintendo
The GameCube era saw Nintendo enter a phase of risk-taking and experimentation as far as its biggest franchises were concerned. Metroid became a first-person shooter, Luigi became a reluctant ghostbuster, and Mario Kart: Double Dash!! became a mathematical equation, one in which the product of doubling the number of drivers per kart would equal the division of the Mario Kart audience. Yet whether you viewed the tandem kart racing as a welcome deepening of the series’ racing strategy or rather an unnecessary convolution of what makes Mario Kart so approachable, Mario Kart: Double Dash!! must be applauded for daring to be different at a time when the kart genre had become a racing grid overcrowded with imitators. And while its pair-based racing would never resurface in the series again, a number of its other innovations – such as the expanded variety of karts – would go on to be commonplace in future sequels. Year: 2001 ● Developer: Traveller’s Tales ● Publisher: Activision
Released after the arrival of the PS2 and aimed primarily at kids, Toy Story Racer didn’t have the minerals to mix it up with Mario or CTR but it made plenty of fans thanks to its imaginative tracks and pint-sized thrills and spills. The camera was mounted further back than usual, which helped with the game’s sense of scale and authentically established the characters as tiny toys threading RC cars through oversized environments. Alongside Muppets RaceMania, Toy Story Racer is also a handy reminder Traveller’s Tales did once make games that weren’t exclusively based on LEGO. Year: 2010 ● Developer: Sumo Digital ● Publisher: Sega
Developer Sumo Digital has a pretty eclectic catalogue but one thing it does a lot of is racing and driving games, and the studio has worked with the likes of Codemasters, Ubisoft, Microsoft, and Sega on more than a dozen of them over the past decade or so. Its partnership with Sega on a handful of OutRun games (dating back to 2004 on the original Xbox) is what laid the groundwork for Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing, a long-overdue attempt by Sega to match Nintendo’s Mario Kart juggernaut with a true equivalent of its own. Sure, there were the Sonic Drift games for Game Gear in the mid ’90s (and some utterly unremarkable and basic mobile phone Sonic racing games that don’t appear to have left Japan), but Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing was the Mario Kart replica that Sega fans had been waiting for.
Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing didn’t rewrite the kart racing rulebook but it did feature power-ups unique to each character, and a driver roster that includes a variety of recognisable Sega icons from games like Crazy Taxi, Shenmue, Space Channel 5, Alex Kidd, and more lining up against the main cast of the Sonic the Hedgehog series. Year: 2008 ● Developer: Nintendo EAD ● Publisher: Nintendo
As with many titles on the Wii, Mario Kart Wii really tried to emphasise accessibility, coming with a plastic wheel attachment for the system’s Wii Remote that allowed newcomers to steer using motion controls. How well that worked I have no idea, as I’m a snob who immediately decried it as being antithetical to the beauty of Mario Kart’s core driving mechanic – i.e. precise, near-constant powersliding. I also didn’t want to look silly holding a plastic steering wheel in mid-air.
Regardless of whether you embraced the motion controls or ignored them, Mario Kart Wii was yet another solid entry in the series and it went on to be the second best-selling game on the Wii – with more than 37 million copies sold to date. So what changed? The field increased from eight to 12 racers, the roster ballooned out to 24 playable characters, and bikes were added in alongside karts. Your choice of character also dictated the vehicles you could choose, with three size classes – small, medium and large – each with different stat ranges. With 32 courses – 16 old, 16 new, and both online and splitscreen multiplayer, Mario Kart Wii was one of the system’s go-to party games. Year: 2001 ● Developer: Konami ● Publisher: Konami
Released as a launch title for the Game Boy Advance, Konami Krazy Racers was admittedly a fairly derivative mascot racer in the Mario Kart mould. However, it was well-received for measuring up surprisingly well to the series that inspired it – even if it was a bit shorter on household names than other games of its ilk (Castlevania’s Dracula and Gray Fox from Metal Gear Solid were lined up against some pretty deep cuts from Konami’s history, several of whom were plucked from Japan-only games). It was relegated to relative obscurity by the release of Mario Kart: Super Circuit shortly afterwards, though Konami did release a sequel on iOS and Android almost a decade later with a largely refreshed character roster, including Pyramid Head from Silent Hills and Frogger from… well, Frogger. Year: 1994 ● Developer: Vivid Image ● Publisher: Ubisoft
Initially released on SNES just over two years after Super Mario Kart laid down the foundation for the whole genre, Street Racer was one of the first rival karting games to try and reverse engineer the 11 secret herbs and spices Nintendo had sprinkled into its ground-breaking karting classic. It honestly didn’t do too bad a job of it, either. The tracks are a little plain and the kart handling a bit basic, but Street Racer replaced Super Mario Kart’s arsenal of items with fun, specific offensive powers for each racer, plus the ability to lash out left or right to wallop nearby opponents. It also boasted four-player splitscreen (and even pupil-punishing eight-player splitscreen in the later PlayStation and Saturn versions) as well as a prehistoric form of Rocket League in Street Racer’s overly-tricky soccer mode. Street Racer ultimately made it to over half a dozen platforms but work on a sequel was shut down in the late ’90s. Year: 2001 ● Developer: Intelligent Systems ● Publisher: Nintendo
Mario Kart: Super Circuit for Game Boy Advance was the third instalment in the Mario Kart series and the first for a handheld, with developer Intelligent Systems somehow crunching Nintendo’s kart racer down to a game cartridge the size of a sugar packet while keeping its contents every bit as sweet. Bundling 20 new circuits with another 20 of the best tracks from the SNES and N64 games, Mario Kart: Super Circuit also added a neat coin-based unlock system to extend the replayability for solo players. But it was the flexibility of its link cable-based multiplayer that made it a mainstay in many players’ GBA carry case, facilitating local GP races and battles for up to four players even if you only had a single cartridge to share between you (and weren’t too macho to race as one of four shades of Yoshi). Year: 2000 ● Developer: Circus Freek ● Publisher: Infogrames
Released on the original PlayStation after the arrival of the PlayStation 2, Looney Tunes Racing was likely lost in the generational shuffle for most folks. 罢丑补迟’蝉 a shame because it was a decent little kart racer that captured the tone of classic Looney Tunes shorts surprisingly well, with the art style faithfully recreated and the over-the-top power-ups well on point. Circus Freek even attempted to match its authentic musical cues to the action on screen (a hallmark of the cartoons). The end result sounded a little fractured in-game, but I admire the effort. Looney Tunes Racing didn’t make a huge dent in kart racing culture but it probably deserves an additional nod for its nifty environmental hazards that could be triggered on the track ahead by driving through special ACME arches (kind of like a proto-Split/Second).
Year: 1999 ● Developer: Funcom ● Publisher: Sony
Speed Freaks (known as Speed Punks in North America) rolled out on PlayStation curiously close to the release of Crash Team Racing (a particularly peculiar situation given both games were published by Sony). Given the mascot might of Crash and the skill of Naughty Dog it probably shouldn’t be surprising CTR went on to become kart racing royalty and Speed Freaks faded away into obscurity but, to be fair, Funcom’s blisteringly fast kart racer was certainly no slouch at the time. Critics and punters alike were impressed with Speed Freaks’ top notch visuals and lightning quick karts. The game’s invisible vehicles (well, except for the tyres and steering wheel) and Rayman-esque characters are probably an acquired taste but, as Speed Freaks was developed in Funcom’s Dublin studio, I guess we can’t really begrudge a team of Irish developers for making their cast completely legless. Year: 2012 ● Developer: Sumo Digital ● Publisher: Sega
Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed changed the beat from its predecessor, introducing tracks that would require the game’s vehicles to switch between karts, boats, and aircraft. Mario Kart 7 had introduced glider sections and underwater segments to its tracks the previous year, but Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed certainly leaned into the concept considerably more. One moment you’d be powersliding around an enormous, banked bend, and the next you’d be whipping across waves or soaring through the air. One unlockable vehicle even transformed from the Hornet from Daytona USA to the F-14 from Afterburner to a floating Dreamcast controller with an outboard bolted to it.
罢丑补迟’蝉 fan service. Year: 2005 ● Developer: Nintendo EAD ● Publisher: Nintendo
Call me old school, but I still think there’s something special about physically getting together with friends to play games. Back when I first started working in this industry that was LAN sessions of Quake (and later Q3A), forming and breaking alliances in Worms Armageddon, splitscreen GoldenEye 007 and, of course, Mario Kart. Every Mario Kart game had its time in the sun, but the one that really rose above the others for me was 2005’s Mario Kart DS.
This was the game that truly delivered on the series’ multiplayer potential. Forget squinting at a quarter of a TV screen, in Mario Kart DS you had your own screen (two even!) and you could have up to eight players racing over wireless LAN - the entire field could be comprised of human racers, in other words. I was lucky enough to be working in an office full of DS owners, so we played it every day for months. Rivalries formed, strategies emerged and the game became part of the culture of the workplace.
Of course, we wouldn’t have latched onto MK DS so ferociously if it wasn’t also a superb evolution of the series, with tight controls, great powersliding mechanics and plenty of courses. Of particular note, not only did this game introduce 16 new courses, it was also the first time that revamped old courses appeared in a Mario Kart game, making the game feel a little like a celebration of the series as a whole. Good times. Year: 1996 ● Developer: Polys Entertainment ● Publisher: Sony
Best described as kart racing by way of a classic Warner Bros. cartoon/fever dream, the Motor Toon Grand Prix games were created in-house at Sony Japan by the group that would go on to become Polyphony Digital. It’s probably no surprise, then, that beneath the bonnet of Motor Toon Grand Prix 2’s trippy world, where cars lurch elastically around corners and courses roam across roulette wheels and past leering dragons, the handling mechanics are surprisingly solid. Sure, you’re still powersliding around corners and firing off bizarre weapons, but you’re also looking for optimal racing lines and building speed by slipstreaming behind other racers.
Looking at it today, Motor Toon Grand Prix 2 was a bit of a grab bag – some courses were far more fantastical than others, and there was no splitscreen support – just the ability to link two PlayStations and use two TVs. Remember that? At least you could save your best times to race against your own ghost, which was still a pretty fresh concept back in the mid ‘90s.
One other note: the original game in the series never left Japan, so when it came to bringing the sequel to the West, PAL territories got Motor Toon Grand Prix 2, whereas it was simply called Motor Toon Grand Prix in North America. It wasn’t confusing at all. Year: 2000 ● Developer: Traveller’s Tales ● Publisher: Midway, Sony
There’s a startling amount of dross at the bottom of the licensed karting game barrel, from flaccid South Park and Shrek tie-ins to aggressively abysmal bargain bin baloney like M&M's Kart Racing. It’s a shame because this sort of shovelware only serves to distract from the good gear, like Muppet RaceMania. Two decades of technological progress haven’t exactly done Traveller’s Tales’ high-speed Henson homage many favours but, at the time, Muppet RaceMania was a fun and vibrant racer put together with a lot of love for the world’s most-precious puppets. With race tracks inspired by the Muppet movies of the ’80s and ’90s, a large stable of characters voiced by real Muppet performers, and tons of collectables and movie clips, this game was elbow-deep in Muppet lore. Even Statler and Waldorf were on deck with their famously snide asides, regularly laying the boot into the game itself. Year: 1994 ● Developer: Beavis Soft ● Publisher: Apogee
Back in the early ’90s, in the immediate wake of the original Super Mario Kart, developer Andy Edwardson began experimenting with trying to recreate the Super Nintendo’s fancy pants Mode 7 graphics on PC. He studied 1992’s Super Mario Kart closely to bring his prototype to life and, after many months of work, Wacky Wheels was born. It lifted the lion’s share of its ideas from Nintendo’s pioneering kart racer but Wacky Wheels deserves at least a little credit for introducing online multiplayer (which beta testers for the game had insisted on following the release of the original Doom).
Wacky Wheels also featured Apogee’s first instance of Remote Ridicule (which continued into Rise of the Triad, where it’s probably more widely recalled). In Wacky Wheels players could psyche out opponents by sending Satan to hover over their kart and literally flash his bare red arse on their screen. For veteran gamers who spent their salad days noodling around on PCs instead of consoles, Wacky Wheels was quite likely their first-ever kart game. That it was an MS-DOS Mario Kart clone where players collected and fired hedgehogs like cannonballs is a fun twist. Year: 2011 ● Developer: Nintendo EAD, Retro Studios ● Publisher: Nintendo
A neat evolution from Mario Kart DS, Mario Kart 7 brought more variety to the series. Courses now took you underwater or saw you gliding through the air, complete with glider/parachute that spontaneously sprouts from your vehicle. Speaking of which, this was the first game in the series that let you customise your kart, choosing from a wide variety of – often comical – bodies, tyres and gliders. This wasn’t just aesthetic either; the parts you chose allowed you to fine-tune your kart’s performance to suit the way you wanted to race.
With 16 new courses (including two set on Wuhu Island, which you probably don’t remember from Wii Sports Resort) and 16 retro courses – as had become standard – there was plenty to dig into. And as you’d expect, the best way to do that was with friends; Mario Kart 7 supported eight player local and online multiplayer. Year: 2010 ● Developer: United Front Games ● Publisher: Sony
With fabulous handling and a stunning array of creation and customisation tools, ModNation Racers is a one-of-a-kind kart racer and one of Sony’s most underappreciated exclusives. In what other game can you have the Predator powersliding the A-Team Van around a cartoon version of Mount Panorama? Or Iron Man drifting Ecto-1 around a wild jungle track cunningly shaped like a… suspicious appendage? The loading times were sketchy and there’s no doubt the user-created content library was an absolute avalanche of intellectual property violations, but ModNation Racers was too good of a kart racer to die before it had the chance to flourish into a proper franchise.
Developer United Front Games followed up ModNation Racers with LittleBigPlanet Karting, which felt similar, but being restricted to the LittleBigPlanet aesthetic after splashing around in the virtually boundless universe of ModNation Racers felt like going from the beach to the bathtub. Year: 1996 ● Developer: Nintendo EAD ● Publisher: Nintendo
Folks have been writing lovely things about Mario Kart 64 for well over two decades now. It’s the game that dragged the fledgling racing series into the third dimension. The game that proved why the N64 had four controller ports on the front of it. The game that defined an entire era of couch-based kart combat.
Of course, it’s also the birthplace of the dirtiest, most despicable, most disgusting, most depraved weapon ever designed: the blue shell.
Truly the boil on the ass of MK64’s incredible legacy. Year: 1997 ● Developer: Rare ● Publisher: Rare, Nintendo
While Mario Kart 64 can be trusted to dominate just about any discussion to be had about kart racers in the late ’90s, plenty of devoted Diddy Kong Racing fans will staunchly argue that Rare’s 1997 racer ran rings around its sister title. Diddy Kong Racing, released just a year after Mario Kart 64, has more vehicle types and more tracks, and it also has a story mode, upgradable weapons, boss races, and secret keys hidden throughout the game that open up new arenas. It also lacked Mario Kart 64’s divisive rubber-band AI; if you were good enough to gap your opponents Diddy Kong Racing didn’t punish you by artificially speeding up your competition. Diddy Kong Racing also marked the first appearances of Banjo the bear and Conker the squirrel, both of whom debuted as fellow racers here before headlining their own games.
Despite Diddy Kong Racing going on to secure a spot in the top 10 best-selling N64 games of all time it never received a proper follow-up beyond a handheld version for DS released a decade later. Work on a GameCube sequel had started at Rare in the early 2000s but the project died on the vine after Microsoft acquired the studio in 2002. Year: 1999 ● Developer: Naughty Dog ● Publisher: Sony
With Crash Bandicoot riding high as the PlayStation’s de facto mascot in the late ’90s, Crash Team Racing was a totally transparent attempt to mimic Nintendo’s Mario Kart 64 magic, albeit with a hefty dose of Diddy Kong Racing added to the design. But what CTR lacked in originality it made up for with quality. Delightful to look at and boasting a remarkably well-honed handling model, CTR instantly established itself as a worthwhile competitor to Nintendo’s karting king. Perhaps the best thing about CTR was how it was largely about skill over luck; with no catch-up shenanigans to speak of, CTR experts who could master the multi-stage drift boost technique and cleverly accumulate Wumpa Fruit to upgrade their weapon power-ups were extremely tough to beat. Even the first-place hunting Warp Orbs could be countered if you kept an Aku Aku/Uka Uka mask (or a shield) in your back pocket. CTR was Naughty Dog’s only Crash kart racer and the series has bounced around with other teams since. Naughty Dog did make one return to racing during the PS2 era with the fun Jak X, ditching traditional kart racing for full-on Twisted Metal-inspired combat racing.
Original PlayStation games can be a little rough on the retinas these days – especially since TVs seem to have tripled in size over the past 20 years – but not to worry: CTR is returning just in time for its 20th anniversary, and the remake feels just like this one. Year: 1992 ● Developer: Nintendo EAD ● Publisher: Nintendo
The Mario Kart series is the barometer against which all other kart racers are consistently judged, and Super Mario Kart is the granddaddy of them all. One of the best-selling SNES games of all time, most of the tropes we associate with kart racing video games to this day were present in Super Mario Kart nearly three decades ago. Zany tracks, wild power-ups, colourful characters; they were all established here. Super Mario Kart didn’t just singlehandedly create the kart racing genre; it signalled to Nintendo that fans would still eagerly flock to non-platformer Mario games. Following Super Mario Kart, Nintendo’s crew of Mario characters became genre-spanning icons and the Mario franchise is currently the best-selling games series of all time as a result. It’s creaky by modern standards, sure, but Super Mario Kart stands as one of the most influential video games of all time. Year: 2017 ● Developer: Nintendo EAD ● Publisher: Nintendo
What does it take to produce the best kart racing game ever made? 48 tracks, 36 racers, and about 25 years of kart racing experience to pull from. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is the pinnacle of the franchise and the genre at large; feature rich, beautiful to behold, and imbued with a balanced item list, wonderfully elastic handling and immaculate track design all working together to create hotter laps than a leaky bowl of soup. It’s relentlessly entertaining at any speed, whether you’re hurtling along Sunshine Airport in blistering 200cc or reliving a last minute red shell shot to snatch victory in a super slow-motion replay, and this Deluxe 2017 Switch release corrects the only major flaw of the 2014 Wii U original by returning the Battle mode to its rightful (and incredible) arena-based setting. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe doesn’t simply overtake the kart racing opposition, it blows them right off the road and regards them with little more than a passing Luigi death stare. Luke is Games Editor at IGN's Sydney office. You can ping him on Twitter @MrLukeReilly and he will reply eventually. Cam is Editor in Chief for IGN's Australian content team. He's also on Twitter. Tristan is the Video Producer at IGN's Sydney office, and you can occasionally find him on Twitter @tristanogilvie. Simon is a Video Producer with IGN's London team and, as luck would have it, he too is on Twitter.
