Gaming anniversaries aren’t something we honestly talk about that often until a major milestone is hit, mainly because we need the benefit of those years to truly understand what a game really means to us, and how much it’s impacted the industry as a whole. As revealed by Nintendo on their Twitter handle, Super Mario Kart has just turned 30 today, and that’s more than enough reason to celebrate. Yes, to be clear, it’s more specifically its release in Japan, but that’s where it came out first, so that still counts as an anniversary.
It’s honestly funny to look back at the original Super Mario Kart and see all the things that are in it, not in it, and how we’ve evolved from it. First and foremost is the graphics. The 2D karts and courses do look really fun even to this day, even the box art is something that you can’t help but smile at depending on how old you are because you likely remember playing this game a lot back when it was out.
The other thing to really note here is that Super Mario Kart was honestly the beginning of an era for Nintendo as a whole. How so? Think about it like this–the game was released in the SNES era of gaming, back when things were still pretty experimental in terms of what you could do with games. Yet, here we had a game that was a crossover between Mario and other franchises like Donkey Kong. This crossover concept would eventually go and turn into things like the Super Smash Bros series, the Mario Party franchise, or the infinite amount of Mario Sports titles that we’re still getting to this day.
Just as important though, the franchise itself has grown incredibly over the years. With each new version of kart racing Nintendo makes having a new feel or gimmick to really make it shine and stand out from the pack. Of course, the biggest irony is that Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is currently the best-selling game on the Nintendo Switch despite it being a port of the Wii U version. Add to that, 5 years after release was when they started to release the Booster Pass content for it, and people are eating that up.
No doubt the franchise will continue for as long as Nintendo can make quality titles, and we’ll see if it is to last another 30 years.
Source: Twitter
