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August 27th, 2012 by Nickie Williams

It’s everyone’s favourite racing game- Mario Kart! How many times have you played the game, trying to beat your score or even beating your little sister? Which was the first version of the game that you ever played? I can remember the first one I played, and it was Mario Kart 64. Which for me is still one of the best versions that Nintendo have ever released.

Designed by Shigeru Miyamoto and first released in 1992 on the Super Nintendo or SNES, the game opened to a massive welcome addition for the franchise. It went on to be one of the best-selling SNES games, and seeing many variations afterwards. The idea of the game is that you drive like a bat out of hell on a little go-kart with Mario sitting atop it and racing against your friends like Luigi, Princess Peace, Bowser, Toad and other alike. Using the power-ups and speed-ups to propel you faster along the course, it was almost like a Nintendo version of Pole Position in the beginning. With up to a possible eight people racing on the track, the idea was to come first in the race and win the cup. To do this, you had to slow down your opponants by tossing out Koopa Shells and laying banana peels on the track. Each race is on average about three laps long. In multiplayer mode, you can challenge friends for the three cups available- the Flower Cup, the Mushroom Cup and the Star Cup. Once those three were collected, the Special Cup was then unlocked and available for you to get.

The series of games were:

Super Mario Kart (1992, Super Nintendo)
Mario Kart 64 (1996, Nintendo 64)
Mario Kart: Super Circuit (2001, Game Boy Advance)
Mario Kart: Double Dash! (2003, Nintendo Gamecube)
Mario Kart DS (2005, Nintendo DS)
Mario Kart Wii (2008, Nintendo Wii)
Mario Kart 7 (2011, Nintendo 3DS)

There have been variations on each game, with Mario Kart Wii giving the ability to use motorbikes and Mario Kart 7 having hang gliders and submarines- as well as the usual go karts.

I’ve personally never owned any of the games, but I’ve played Mario Kart 7 a couple of times and I’ve been giving some thought to downloading a copy of Super Mario Kart on the Virtual Console. Have you ever owned any of the games? And if so- which ones?