Five Fun Facts: Mario Kart
The Mario Kart series is a gaming icon. A title in the Mario Kart series has appeared on nearly every Nintendo console since the Super Nintendo, with eleven titles to its name if you count the 3 arcade games, and time after time Nintendo has come through with an awesome racing game.
Here are Five Interesting Facts you may not know about the Mario Kart series.
1.The Original SNES Super Mario Kart was subject to a little bit of censorship in North America. In the Japanese version of the game, Peach’s victory screen shows her drinking a celebratory bottle of champagne with a red face, implying she’s drunk. Same with Bowsers victory screen. This was changed in the American and European versions so that Bowser is just holding a bottle of champagne and Peach is throwing her’s up in the air.
2.Because of the low user base of the Wii U, if every Wii U owner were to buy a copy of Mario Kart 8 at launch, it would still be the 2nd worst selling game in Mario Kart history. As of right now, there are only 6.17 million Wii U systems worldwide. Every other Mario Kart game with the exception of Mario Kart: Super Circuit for the Game Boy Advance sold more than that. Nintendo plans on selling 3.6 million more Wii Us this year, but even if all THOSE people bought a copy of Mario Kart 8 it still wouldn’t be close to the 23 million copies of Mario Kart DS, or the staggering 35 million copies of Mario Kart Wii that were sold. In fact, Mario Kart Wii was the 3rd best selling video game of all time, second only to Super Mario Bros and Wii Sports. With such a low Wii U Install base, it looks like Mario Kart 8 may only sell about 1.3 million copies. This may be why Nintendo is planning an aggressive year long marketing strategy for the game, hoping it will start selling Wii U’s.
3.Mario Kart actually encourages screen peeking! Both the Super Mario Kart and the Mario Kart 64 instruction manuals specifically encourage you to look at the other players screen during battle mode. Maybe this is why the Block Fort level is split into four colours. You could look down at your friends screen and easily know what part of the map they’re on.
4. The unavoidable blue shell (OK, almost always unavoidable blue shell) first appeared in Mario Kart 64. It came into existance because Nintendo needed a way to keep the 8 racers closer together to keep all the players “in it until the end.” The developers were afraid that one player getting to far ahead would overload the N64 processor and cause the game to slow down. The game can decide to give a non player controlled racer a blue shell to even out the game, keeping the pack closer together and preventing slowdown. In later versions of Mario Kart, the processor limitation is no longer an issue, but the blue shell still exists as a way to keep all players on a level playing field.
5.In Mario Kart 64, allowing the Results Screen music to loop 64 times causes the song to change. So if you sit through 54 minutes and 39 seconds of the results screen, it eventually plays an alternate version of the same song. It is unknown if this is an intentional reference to the Nintendo 64 or a bug. It is theorized that the two pieces of music were supposed to alternate, playing two times each, but a binary counter bug makes the first segment play 64 times before the second piece has a chance to do it’s two plays.