TG’s 50 greatest games of all time: Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (but only when you win)

Back in 1990, Shigeru Miyamoto’s Nintendo team were noodling around with an idea for “a fun, lighthearted game where you zip around unrealistically in cars,” as he put it in the game’s official strategy guide.

“It wouldn’t be the life-or-death, dangerous world of F1 racing, but more the atmosphere of screeching wheels as you zip around an amusement park.” It’s probably fair to say they were onto something.

Mario Kart has certainly ticked those boxes over the years. The manner in which you zip around is unrealistic, true. Amusement park vibes, they’re there too. Just one thing we’d pull Mr Miyamoto up on, though: ‘lighthearted’.

Let’s face it, playing Mario Kart 8: Deluxe is about as lighthearted as Max and Lewis heading into turn one at Monza. This is family fun for all ages and abilities, its cheery colour palette and tracks made of sweets tell you, but you know better. The breezy music speeds up now as you start the final lap, and your deathgrip on the Switch controller tightens. You know the blue shell is coming. The question is: exactly how vindictively is it going to ruin your race?

And those are the two paradoxical layers of Mario Kart, the greatest racing game ever to make you throw a controller at a wall. At one and the same time, it really is the sort of game anybody could pick up and enjoy, and also the most cruel and ultra-competitive racer in history.

It all comes down to the power-ups. Remove them from the formula, and you’ve simply got some karts skidding around on brilliantly designed tracks. The best driver would make their way to the front, taking nice lines through the corners and powersliding to build up boost for the straights. And they’d win. The drivers who lost would reflect on the fact they probably didn’t take the corners as well as the winner, and that would really be the extent of the recourse.

In actuality, Mario Kart 8: Deluxe is somewhere between a racing sim and a slot machine. Its power-ups affect the outcome of the race just as much as your driving inputs – and they’re rigged to favour the slower racers.

If you’re up in the podium positions, you’ll pick up toothless items like coins, bananas, the odd green shell. Back in P12 meanwhile, they’re having an absolute hoot – lightning bolts that make everybody else tiny and slow while you speed along. Bullet Bills that propel you through the lap at superspeed, on autopilot to boot. And, most controversially of all, blue shells.

Here’s the item that really sums up Mario Kart’s ethos. When you pick one up and use it, it sets off to whoever’s in P1 like a homing missile. No matter how far out in front they are, or how diligently they’ve been driving, that blue shell is going to find them and blow them up, bringing them to an extended standstill.

There are ways to counter it. If you were lucky enough to pick up a horn, you can toot it at the precise moment it’s about to hit you to deflect it. Even less probable, if you have a mushroom you can use it to boost away from the blue shell. Otherwise? You sit back and take your punishment for having driven so well up to this point.

So hang on, what’s this game doing among TG’s 50 greatest games? It’s blatantly unfair, punishes good driving, and makes grown adults cry into their hands. It’s also constructed so expertly that you’ll play it obsessively anyway.

Each track has a vivid personality. Is it like flipping between kids’ TV channels? A bit, but once you square away the fact you’re racing at somewhere called Sweet Sweet Canyon all that matters is how well the corners flow, where the sneaky shortcuts are, and how satisfying it feels to hold a powerslide through a section of esses long enough to generate a gold boost.

The kart customisation runs surprisingly deep too, considering you’re picking between motorised prams and cat-faced cabriolets for a gorilla or a dinosaur to drive. The more time you spend with it, the more fixated you become on finding the sweet spot between speed, weight and grip.

The handling is far, far silkier and more skill-based than it seems at first, and that draws you into an ever-deeper obsession with getting quicker. One day, you vow, you’ll be so far ahead of them all that the blue shell won’t even catch up to you before the finish line.