When Nintendo showed off its new console at the Shoshinkai show in Tokyo in November 1996, Edge reported that “the star of the show” was a game: Mario Kart 64, “which drew hordes of gamers”. It was the sequel to Super Mario Kart, a two-player racer drawn on the Super NES’s flat mode 7 floor. The new game had hills, tunnels and jumps, and the Nintendo 64’s four controller ports let four people race or fight at once. Its director, Hideki Konno, told Edge what he thought players would enjoy most: “Competing with your friends.”
Fast facts
- Developer and publisher: Nintendo.
- Director: Hideki Konno. Producer: Shigeru Miyamoto.
- Working title: Super Mario Kart R.
- Released: December 1996 in Japan at ¥9,800; February 1997 in North America; June 1997 in Britain at £59.99.
- Players: one to four, in a split screen.
- Courses: 16 race tracks in four cups (Mushroom, Flower, Star and Special), and four battle arenas.
From a flat floor to hills
Konno was blunt about the first game: “We used Mode 7 for Super Mario Kart, but it was not actually 3D.” The Super Famicom could not do what his team had wanted, “such as making the tracks go up or down so that karts can jump, or placing tunnels on the course”. It also could not hold many different courses, so the first game had reused the same scenery with changed layouts. On the Nintendo 64, he said, there would be 20 courses, “each of which will be different”, counting the battle arenas, and the game would run “on average” at about 30 frames a second. Four-player racing and battle, he added, “were impossible without the N64’s performance”.
Edge reviewed the Japanese cartridge in February 1997. It found the tracks “remarkably open”, with banks and terrain to drive over, a paddle steamer and a Wild West steam train beside them, rush-hour traffic on Toad’s track, and a Wario Stadium that was “absolutely enormous”. Races were three laps long, which the magazine thought sensible given the size of some courses. It also thought only “a handful” of tracks were “genuinely interesting”, that some seemed “almost unfinished”, and that Rainbow Road “turns out to be a dreadfully boring experience”. It gave the game eight out of ten, saying that its multiplayer modes, battle game, sound and visuals would still make it a hit.
The karts were steered with the Nintendo 64’s analogue stick. N64 Magazine found the control “immensely subtle”: “you’ve got to treat Mario Kart’s karts like real go-karts, powering round bends, clipping corners, veering past pot-holes and hopping over banana skins.” Computer and Video Games explained the trick that experts lived by. Hop into a bend with the shoulder button, hold the slide, steering into it and back, until the exhaust smoke turns orange, then let go for a burst of speed “just as if you’d used a mushroom”.
The blue shell
The items changed the most. Instead of fixed panels that emptied once used, the item boxes now came back after being collected, and the computer drivers picked up and used items exactly as the player did. Green and red shells, bananas, mushrooms, the star, the ghost and the lightning bolt, which shrinks every rival, returned from the first game. New were shells and bananas in threes and bunches, a golden mushroom that could be used again and again for a short time, a fake item box, and what Edge called “a spiky blue shell, which homes in on the race leader”.
What a player received depended on where they were. N64 Magazine’s tips listed it: green shells and bananas near the front, red shells and mushrooms in the middle, and stars, lightning bolts and spiny shells at the back. Combined with computer drivers that always caught up, it kept races close, and reviewers grumbled. Edge complained that “the CPU competition cheats in order to keep up with your kart”, and N64 Magazine that “CPU karts do cheat outrageously”. Computer and Video Games thought the game had shifted from “about 70% racing and 30% combat” to something “much more combat-based”.
The blue shell outlived the argument. Reviewing Mario Kart 7 in January 2012, Edge noted that it “was introduced in its successor, Mario Kart 64, and has been ever-present since”, and blamed the Nintendo 64 game for tilting the series towards attacking items.
Four at once
Konno was clear about why the four ports mattered: “You’ll soon realise why we wanted to give the N64 four controller ports.” With three or four players there were no computer drivers in the race, and Edge found that the game kept its speed even then.
Battle mode returned from the first game, now for four. Each kart carried three balloons, each hit burst one, and the last kart with a balloon won. The four arenas were Big Donut, a ring around a pit of lava; Block Fort and Double Deck, built on several levels; and Skyscraper, on a rooftop. A player who lost every balloon came back as a bomb kart, able to drive into a rival and take one of theirs, which Computer and Video Games called “a small price to pay for sweet revenge”. Not everyone liked the new arenas. N64 Magazine thought them “about ten times bigger” than the old ones, so that even with four players “you hardly ever spot anyone to attack”.
The PAL version
The British release was brought forward to 13 June 1997, and N64 Magazine compared it with the Japanese cartridge it had been playing for months. The PAL game had borders, ran about 20 per cent slower, and had frozen twice in multiplayer races. It gave the conversion four out of ten and objected to the price: “£60? Honestly. Do they still think we’re all rich aristocrats here in Britain, or something?” Nintendo Official Magazine listed it at £59.99. The same reviewer still wrote: “I’ve played it more than all the N64’s other games put together, and, six months after plugging it in for the first time, I still love it as much as ever.”
Sales and later releases
In America, Edge counted Mario Kart 64 among the Nintendo 64’s “platinum-selling titles” by September 1997, and Nintendo Official Magazine reported that it had reached “million-selling status Stateside”. Wikipedia, citing a 2014 Game Informer report, gives 9.87 million copies worldwide. Nintendo later sold it again on the Wii’s Virtual Console in 2007, on the Wii U’s, and from October 2021 through its Nintendo Switch Online service.
Sources
- Edge issue 41, January 1997: Shoshinkai report (“the star of the show”; the cartridge bundled with a controller); interview with Shigeru Miyamoto; interview with Hideki Konno (“its true creator, the game’s director”), quoted above on mode 7, the courses, the frame rate and the four ports.
- Edge issue 42, February 1997: review of the Japanese release, ¥9,800, eight out of ten; the item list and the blue shell, the cups and tracks, three-lap races, the CPU drivers and the absence of CPU karts in three- and four-player races.
- Computer and Video Games issue 184, March 1997: import preview; the items and the regenerating item boxes, firing shells backwards, the power slide and boost, Time Attack, the bomb kart, mirror mode, and the shift from racing to combat.
- N64 Magazine issue 1, April 1997: import review (“Mario and his pals won’t be karting into the UK until June”), the controls and the cheating CPU karts.
- N64 Magazine issue 4, July 1997: the UK version, the 13 June release date, £60, the slower speed and borders, the crashes and the conversion rating; the reviewer on Time Trial and Battle mode; position-based items.
- Nintendo Official Magazine issue 58, July 1997: UK review, £59.99; Toad’s track and the battle arenas. Nintendo Power issue 93, February 1997: the Skyscraper arena “high on the roof of a skyscraper”.
- Edge issue 49, September 1997, news: Mario Kart 64 among the “platinum-selling titles” in America. Nintendo Official Magazine issue 60, September 1997: “million-selling status Stateside”.
- Edge issue 236, January 2012, p. 124: Mario Kart 7 review on the blue shell’s introduction in Mario Kart 64.
- Club Nintendo (Germany) volume 8 issue 1, February 1996, and Computer and Video Games issue 171, February 1996: Shoshinkai 1995 line-ups listing Super Mario Kart R.
- Wikipedia, “Mario Kart 64” (accessed October 2026) (web, secondary): release dates, the 9.87 million sales figure (citing Game Informer, June 2014) and the Virtual Console and Nintendo Switch Online releases. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Kart_64