For all the frustration the chaos of Mario Kart can cause, there’s always been the comfort that the game itself can’t hurt you (unlike your siblings). That all changed with Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit. Released in 2020, Home Circuit is a mixed reality game that turns players’ living room into an IRL course for remote-controlled kart racing.

And at the center of that launch is Mario Kart World, an ambitious sequel to one of the best-selling games of all time from perhaps the single most revered game studio in the world: Nintendo Entertainment Planning & Development (to give Nintendo’s game development arm its full title).

Back at the series' beginnings, the Mario Kart games, as the name implies, were kart racers purely for Mario characters. However, with the slow introduction of characters like R.O.B. and Mario-adjacent additions like the wider Kong clan,