Extra Star Cup – Mario Kart: Super Circuit

[For the second time this week, it’s guest post time! I’m pleased to hand over to Alexander Sigsworth, who you can find blogging at alexsigsworth.wordpress.com and who previously wrote about Driver.]

**Mario Kart: Super Circuit** (Nintendo, Game Boy Advance, 2001)

On 9th August 2000, manga magazine Korokoro exclusively announced development of a Mario Kart game for the Game Boy Advance.

It made sense – Mario Kart was, and still is, an extremely popular series. Four of the more recent Mario Kart games became the best-selling games of their respective platforms, including the current generation’s Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for the Switch. A new Mario Kart game brings significant attention to its console, especially if it can demonstrate the system’s unique features by integrating them into its gameplay.

Following the tradition of Super Mario Kart (for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System) and Mario Kart 64 (for NINTENDO⁶⁴), this instalment in the series was to be called Mario Kart Advance. This title more than just confirmed the game’s compatible platform; it also communicated the gap in the market the game had been commissioned to fill; there hadn’t previously been a Mario Kart game for a handheld system. Despite the success of the Game Boy and Game Boy Color, Mario Kart had remained grounded on home consoles – likely due to the limitations of 8-bit processors. The Game Boy Advance’s processor was 32-bit. It’s likely that Nintendo had held-off the series’ expansion into portable gaming until their hardware had become more, um, advanced.

Of course, Mario Kart Advance came, at some point, for some reason, to be retitled to Mario Kart: Super Circuit and… any reason for this, it would seem, has yet to surface. The original title was retained in Japanese but, for English releases, it was decided Mario Kart: Super Circuit was preferable. No other Mario Kart game has been titled like this. Most of them either stick with a number or incorporate the name of their console – even the title of Mario Kart: Double Dash!! reminds players of its core gameplay concept.

Instead, Mario Kart: Super Circuit’s title says nothing, which I find rather interesting because something I noticed during research into contemporary fan opinion of the game is that it’s generally considered to be the most mediocre of the Mario Kart series. Not bad, by no means unenjoyable but still average by Mario Kart’s usual standards. The least well-remembered.

It’s true that it doesn’t contribute anything of note to the series: it didn’t debut any items or new playable characters and is, stylistically, not as distinct as its peers. It’s also true that the character lineup is the same as Mario Kart 64’s, including some voice samples. Yoshi’s was the only original voice recording included in the game, while the voices of Luigi, Peach, Wario and Toad weren’t even localised. With no previous handheld Mario Kart games to draw from, Mario Kart: Super Circuit is, in many ways, a combination of Super Mario Kart and Mario Kart 64. It’s easy to point at things like this and use them as examples of the game being a bit cheap or derivative in ways the other Mario Kart games aren’t. It is easy to do that. It isn’t necessarily inaccurate.

Yet, it’s the fourth best-selling game for the Game Boy Advance overall and the best selling Mario game for the Game Boy Advance out of the 18 released in total. It’s the highest-rated Mario Kart game on Metacritic and was certified platinum by the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association for selling at least 300, 000 copies. That doesn’t happen for no reason. There’s no disputing Mario Kart: Super Circuit’s status as a game that was beloved in its time – but I reject the idea that this was because much better Mario Kart games were yet to be released.

For starters, there’s the fact that Mario Kart: Super Circuit, while it debuted no new items, did debut unlockables to the Mario Kart series.

There are five cups of four tracks – Mushroom, Flower, Lightning, Star, and Special – but not all of them are initially available. Instead, the player unlocks new cups based on their success in Mario GP mode, which requires them to place consistently highly in each race in order to carry-over to the next one. Even then, once a cup is unlocked, it still needs to be unlocked in the other difficulties in order to be playable in that difficulty. Unlocking Special Cup in 50cc isn’t the end of the game – it must also be unlocked in 100cc and 150cc.

There needed to be an incentive for players to make good use of the Game Boy Advance’s portable status and, as a result, Mario Kart: Super Circuit has the strictest progression system of any Mario Kart game so far. If home consoles are for leisure, handheld consoles are for fully-absorbing addiction.

It’s also not just other cups that can be unlocked but alternate versions of cups. Winning cups is a test of how well the player can race but not necessarily of how well they can drive – that’s determined by how many coins they can collect. If, at the end of a cup, the player collected and retained at least 100 coins in each race, they unlocked the cup’s corresponding Extra Cup – regardless of their final position.

Each Extra Cup consists of tracks ported from Super Mario Kart; unlocking all Extra Cups unlocks all of the original Super Mario Kart tracks and they, too, must be unlocked in each difficulty separately.

In total, that requires the unlocking of twelve cups, plus twenty extra cups with at least 2000 coins. Not bad for the first handheld instalment.

To put that into perspective, each Mario Kart: Super Circuit cartridge includes one copy of Mario Kart: Super Circuit and a free copy of Super Mario Kart ported to the Game Boy Advance. Okay, that means the original’s map view screen is gone and certain obstacles aren’t brought-over but no other Mario Kart game has ever transplanted every track from one of its predecessors. Some might consider this lazy but I dispute that: they’re not the core of the game. Instead, they’re rewards for being dedicated enough to the game to even advance that far.

While it’s possible that players could’ve discovered this secret online or in a gaming magazine or from one of their friends, this was a time when it was still likely that the way most players discovered the Extra Cups was by unlocking them legitimately – either by specifically working to collect as many coins as possible in order to boost their final grade awarded at the end of a Mario GP or by simply playing well enough to do that anyway. The presence of the Extra Cups wasn’t known. There’s no indication in the game that there are any hidden cups to unlock. Once Special Cup has been unlocked in 150cc, that seemed to be the completion of the game. The Extra Cups would only have been discovered by players who possessed “the skills” or came across them incidentally by being enough of a completionist.

The necessity to unlock each cup in every difficulty separately may be the most demanding progression system for a Mario Kart game but the unlocking of the Extra Cups balances it by providing the most rewarding payoff. Mario Kart games are, for the most part, fun arcade racers that can bring people together because everyone’s able to enjoy them and because they’re generally simple enough to understand, whereas Mario Kart: Super Circuit rewards playing well more than the others. There are no Bullets Bill for instant winning. The red shells don’t navigate the track perfectly, requiring good judgement before firing them. Item boxes will give out blue shells but this happens so rarely that I can’t even remember the last time I had one.

Not that this was all at the expense of Mario Kart’s established appeal. Mario Kart: Super Circuit still brought people together like all the other Mario Karts did and do – it was just different people in a different way. It needed to be. Mario Karts Super and 64 were already popular with families and party guests but the Game Boy Advance’s ease of portability enabled it to be played in more settings. Now, Mario Kart could be taken to school for multiplayer races against friends before class and during lunchtimes. Merely bragging was no longer enough: Mario Karters had now been given the chance to prove themselves against their peers. Amateur tournaments could be held, with league tables and a running score equating to RP. The traditional arcade may have been in decline but the Game Boy Advance kept its spirit alive.

This is what really makes Mario Kart: Super Circuit stand out: it was the instalment that brought the series to the masses. Anyone with a Game Boy Advance could play it – even the ones who didn’t have their own cartridge. The system’s link-up cables enabled up to four players to race against each other with just one cartridge between them. Hardware limitations meant that players could only ever race as Yoshi in one of four colours and only four tracks from the extra cups were available due to being less memory-intensive. It was a limitation but was importantly a limitation of something unprecedented: being able to play so much of one game without even owning it. You only needed to know someone else who did. Being able to play four-way multiplayer of a game with only one cartridge between the group? It was like magic. It meant you could join in without having to invest in the game yourself – which, for a game with a large child audience, was a godsend. Of course, if you did, you were no longer limited to just the one character or the four tracks. You got a small sample of the game for nothing, so of course people wanted to play the rest of it. If there’s anything that made Mario Kart: Super Circuit such a financial success, it was the use of the Game Boy Advance’s Link-Up cable to advertise it to players’ friends. No other Mario Kart game has used that nature of hardware (because there was no need).

Mario Kart: Link-Up would’ve made for a great title; it would’ve represented the ability of the game to bring players together in groups and would remind players in the present of their good memories of doing that. Instead, we got Mario Kart: Super Circuit, a title which overlooks an unbelievable act of publisher generosity and effective marketing to say… not much. Perhaps it refers to the inclusion of the Super Mario Kart circuits? Maybe that was the original plan. We may never know.

But what I do know is that Mario Kart: Super Circuit isn’t just “another one”. Statistically, it may not have added any identifiable features to the series but that’s not what it’s really about, though, is it? Video games – particularly Mario games – are about fun and their ability to bring people together. Handheld games have a unique way of doing that which home consoles don’t – and this is demonstrated by their Mario Kart games. It was conceived for a platform which is fundamentally a social one. Nintendo enabled the game to be played by three-quarters more than its sales numbers indicated – which, in turn, created a positive feedback loop. Yes, it was good for the line charts. Yes, it maintained their value as a company. But for the players, it was an act of love they could all share. Yet, it’s remembered today as the opposite, as a stamped corporate product, and the only explanation I have for this is how it was branded.

It was tricky to market. It was the first handheld Mario Kart game. It was uncharted territory. There was no way of knowing how it would turn out. It could’ve become a rather embarrassing example of that time Nintendo attempted to make a Mario Kart game for portable consoles and failed. But it wasn’t, it didn’t, it hasn’t. What is has become is a game that’s unfairly dismissed because what made it great in its day was its day. A day before physical hardware had been replaced with wireless connectivity. A day before one’s own group of friends was overshadowed by the rest of the world. A day when a game’s innermost secrets were less easy to find in an online strategy guide.

The Internet is a great thing. I’ve met people through it I’d otherwise have never even known existed. It’s provided opportunities I’d have otherwise been unable to imagine. But what is the cost of all of that? The globalisation of entertainment media has replaced a certain intimacy. Mario Kart: Super Circuit thrived on such intimacy. Its greatness has been forgotten because that time has been forgotten. But if you go back to it and give it a chance, I really believe you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Like me, you might even find yourself reflecting on how much more special, more meaningful and more valuable your experience of gaming used to be.