Holism: The Items in Mario Kart’s Wacky Races

Mario Kart, Nintendo’s premiere racing series, is known for its items. Right from the starting line, part of what made the original Super Mario Kart so influential was how well it reimagined combat mechanics as something casual, exciting, and fully integrated into the racing. As you drive, you regularly run into glowing, rainbow colored Item Boxes (painted onto the ground in Super; typically animated as 3D objects afterwards). These give you items that might increase your speed or knock out a rival. Unless you play in a mode that removes them, you’re expected to use whatever you find. However, you don’t control what you get, only how you use it. There are a range of possible items, distinct for each game, and the algorithms that determine what you get are inscrutable and often obscured. For ease, we’ll primarily look at Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, my favorite entry, the newest on Nintendo hardware, and by far the most successful. But the basic principles hold for every entry in the series.

Image: Source Gaming. Isabelle from Animal Crossing drives through an Item Box at the start of Daisy Circuit. What’s she gonna get?

I’m just going to get this part out of the way: yes, this can lead to problems. Mario Kart has always fielded some controversy over it, especially because of how these power-ups are distributed. Instead of everyone getting the same odds, the series uses a weighted randomness; players at the back of the line get super-powerful items that give them invincibility or blast them forward, while whoever’s in first place is stuck with Coins, basic shells, or Banana Peels. The actual calculation is different in any game; in Mario Kart 8 it’s based on the person’s physical distance from the first-place driver, while in others it’s based purely around a driver’s current rank. No matter how it’s tabulated, this stop races from being matches of pure skill and boost people who aren’t doing as well. The most extreme example of this is the iconic Spiny Shell, which debuted in the series’ second entry, Mario Kart 64. You can only get the blue monstrosity if you’re losing badly, and its job is to barrel to the head of the pack and hit the driver in first with a damaging, slow blast. At times, the games have been decried as actively punishing you for playing well, though I think that’s an unhealthy way of looking at it.

Image: Source Gaming. Anyone who spends much of their time in 1st Place will see plenty of Blue Shells come their way.

But generally, you can see this as a broad stroke for more casual play. The Blue Shell’s explosion won’t just be “an” attack but a gigantic explosion that often puts its target out of commission. Sometimes, you’ll be unlucky enough to take two or even three in a row. Attacks like these hit hard, there’s not a lot of ways to counter them, and it can sting when you suffer a rapid onslaught of physically unavoidable setbacks. This is the problem central to the series’ worst item, the Lightning Bolt. All it does is slightly ruin the day of every driver save the one who used it, taking their items, coins, and even changing the music to an annoying, high pitched remix. Nintendo’s never been interested in making the series a granular, hyper-competitive experience, but it can be frustrating when you know you did everything right and still lost out due to chance. However, beneath this appearance of noncompetitive design and the problems it makes lies a mechanic that is actually quite brilliant. It’s fun, dynamic, and in the best entries becomes a tool that adds to skill and competition, not just a tool that limits them.

Image: Source Gaming. Three drivers vying for dominance in a match.

Before that, let’s discuss the basic item types, because I think it’s good to have a baseline of what’s getting moved in and out of each driver’s rotation. You can boil Mario Kart items down into three distinct goals that the power-ups seek to fulfill. The first goal is to improve your speed. These include the Red Mushroom (which gives you a momentary boost), the Golden Mushroom (which gives you a much longer boost), or the humble Coin (which, alongside a boost that’s barely perceptible, bolsters the pile of collectible coins that raises your top speed). The second goal is to attack rival drivers, primarily the ones ahead of you. The classic items here are the shells: Green shoots forward and bounces off walls, Red homes in on the person right in front, and Spiny hits anyone in its path to that first place target. The third goal is a bit more nebulous and kind of a grab bag for everything else, but it’s roughly to play mind games, attack people behind you, or to otherwise act in a defensive manner in a very offense-heavy environment. That can be a Banana Peel, a Bob-Omb, or a dangerous Fake Item Box—all of which, coincidentally, manipulate the environment and are best served thrown behind you rather than in front of you. The reason why I’m treating these as goals and not items is that most items fulfill multiple goals at once. The Super Star increases your speed while making you invincible, while the Piranha Plant gives you semi-random speed boosts as it noshes on other drivers. Several can be held behind you, acting like a one-off shield that makes them a tool of both offense and defense.

Image: Source Gaming. An evolution of an item from Mario Kart 7, the Crazy Eight gives you a coterie of items. Naturally, it’s only available for human players, and those in the way back. I’m good enough at MK8D that I had to actively sink Luigi’s game for the first two rounds. Having so many items only helps you jump up a few spots, but I was able to use it to start my way to a photo finish win.

What this means is that Mario Kart can easily identify the items that are most useful and most powerful at any point. Which ones fulfill the most important goals for a racer right now. So while you can tweak their individual stats and every Mario Kart sequel has in some way, one of the best ways to balance them is to simply restrict when they’re accessed. This also avoids a potential problem of trying to balance the items so much that the flashier, bombastic, “overpowered” ones lose some of what makes them fun. Instead, players in the back have stuff like the Bullet Bill and Spiny Shell, which are exciting and empowering and confer a sense of tangible power. But as those items move them up a few ranks, then they get taken out of rotation little by little until, if they manage to get in the lead, they wind up stuck with Green Shells and Banana Peels. Stuff that would be utterly useless to someone in twelfth place. The only speed boosting item the leading racer will get is the Coin, the kind of item most players automatically use out of frustration. Incidentally, this is why many entries only give the Blue Shell to people in the middle. They’ll get a lot more out of it than someone in dead last.

Image: Source Gaming. In first place, the Red Shell sometimes seems a bit useless, since its homing properties are meaningless without someone in front of you. But it’s a shield and can hit anyone who suddenly overtakes you.

There’s quite a difference between the randomness in Mario Kart and that of its cultural sibling Super Smash Bros., and they need to be different for a reason. Smash is almost entirely unbiased by a player’s standing in a match, which doesn’t help less skilled players be better or get an advantage, but that’s okay since its mechanics are designed for wild turnabouts. In theory, anyone in a Time or Stock match can start retaking ground. That dynamic doesn’t exist in Mario Kart unless a winning player actively drives backwards and kills their lead. Everyone’s on the same track in the same direction, so if we’re using tools to account for a person’s standing, it has to be with the idea of them closing or holding a gap. The weighted items, then, are about accounting for the person’s place within that gap.

Image: Source Gaming. The gap between Birdo and Waluigi is pretty small; she’s barely in his side of the screen. And the difference in the items they get is pretty small, too. But it’s there.

There are many benefits to this direction, though by far the most obvious one comes from how it boosts everyone in the back. This can help newer and less skilled players keep themselves from falling into a feedback loop of continuously losing more and more ground. The standouts here are the Super Star and the Bullet Bill, as they also provide invincibility from other players—and from Mario Kart’s many environmental hazards, which from my personal experience hamper novices the most by far. Notably, these tools don’t let you instantly win, and if they bring a 12th place entrant into 7th or 8th, then that person will be taken out of that pool and start getting access to a new array of potential items (which may include the ultra-powerful ones, but if so they’ll be weighted to be less common). But I’d argue this is also good for the pacing. Allowing more people to be competitive makes matches more propulsive, less drawn out, and it can help lead to stories in which one random bit of luck is only the jumpstart to a dynamic rise through the ranks.

Image: Source Gaming. The Super Star, Golden Mushroom, and Bullet Bill over there are very flashy, somewhat “simple” items, but they’re also fun to use. I never get to use them normally, so using them while getting these screenshots was a lot of fun. It makes them especially compelling (and helpful) for less skilled players.

Conversely, preventing someone in first place from artificially boosting their speed keeps them from simply increasing the lead to a point that’s incontestable. If a leading driver racing away at top speed suddenly gets access to a Golden Mushroom, Super Star, or god help us a Bullet Bill, then everyone else is now going to need to be fast enough to overcome that boost, not just match it. It’s the same thing with helping the people at the end, just in reverse. This is, secretly, actually good for the first place driver. Staying too far ahead effectively removes rivals from the equation and makes the race less interesting, so this keeps you in the gap and hopefully playing with your rivals. Less subtle racing games, including some Mario Kart entries, get at this through rubber banding computer players to a winning human, but that’s irritating and lacks the basic clarity of “driving through a box gives you an item.”

Image: Source Gaming. The problem with giving Rosalina speed-boosting items is that the game already provides speed boosts thanks to those orange panels. She has every advantage. And the further ahead she gets, then the only interactions she’ll have with other drivers is Blue Shells and Red Shells and Bloopers.

All of this leads to something rather interesting in the best Mario Kart games. See, while everyone in a race has to be aggressive—it is a race—it’s not evenly aggressive. Drivers in last place have to really hustle to break the gap, and their stuff helps achieve that: flying forward, hitting everyone else, and surviving obstacles. Notably, these are also the most bombastic things, the stuff new players especially like (again from personal experience, new players love the Bullet Bill, even though it takes control from you). Players in the middle have to move as well, but they have to rely more on their own skills and get tools built for making up a smaller amount of ground. And without those speed-increasing items, the leading driver can only rely on their own momentum and skills to stay in front. They get items with limited offensive power, but you also don’t need offensive power if there’s no one ahead of you to hit. So if you’re in first place, suddenly Mario Kart changes subtly from a game where you’re trying to be number one to a game where you’re trying to stay number one. You drop Banana Peels in front of an Item Box, hold a Green Shell behind you to block encroaching Red Shells, and maybe get a Red Shell of your own in case someone sneaks past you.

Image: Source Gaming. Bowser Jr. in a space of first-place peril. His only items are a Banana Peel, which can work as a one-time shield against that incoming Red Shell, and a Coin that is effectively useless since he’s maxed out with ten Coins already. He can’t artificially speed up, so instead he has to be defensive.

Mario Kart 8 pushed this idea with its signature item, the Super Horn. On its own, it’s incredibly situational; you blast people around you in one loud area of effect attack. In a series where people can strike from far behind or lay down a trap that may not be sprung for over a minute, its range is small and limited. But it’s given to people in the front for its special ability to destroy a Spiny Shell. Obviously, being a hard counter for one of the most notorious items in video games makes it quite valuable. But it can be used to stop any incoming item or player, and since the game also nerfed the length of time you recover from a Blue Shell—in previous games each hit felt absolutely ruinous—it creates a question of, say, whether to use it against an incoming Red Shell or to take the hit on the chance that a Blue one might spawn in. This is the cornerstone of what it means to be in first place in these games: debating the best way to keep it that way. You have to be just as aggressive as everyone else and the most defensive person in the game.

Image: Source Gaming. The Super Horn: perfect Spiny Shell killer.

In a game that pulls off this kind of randomness, as Mario Kart 8 often does, being in first place makes you feel tense and not just dominant. You’re winning, and that makes you the target. You play differently. Instead of automatically using the overpowered stuff as you tend to do in the back, or being a bit situational but still offensive as you tend to do in the middle, you really have to consider what you have and when to use it. That means knowing how close you are to a set of Item Boxes, and debating whether to use what you have now and take a chance on what you’ll get. It also means knowing the randomness itself. For instance, Deluxe lets players hold two items at once, and as a rule, it’ll never give a Coin to someone already holding a Coin. So, if you’re winning and have a Coin, then you might want to just hold onto it until you hit your next box. Mario Kart: Double Dash!! also lets you hold two items, and in both games that means leading players have more tools to defend themselves but are even bigger targets. This kind of dynamic is better suited to experienced players anyway, as they’re presumably more familiar with the tracks, the mechanics, and the items.

Image: Source Gaming. Pauline with three Green Shells and a just-thrown Red Shell. Having multiple items can be really empowering, but from my experience they’re far from tools that send you to first place automatically.

All of this means that Mario Kart matches can have a wonderful sense of dynamism, energy, and pace. It provides a kind of fun that’s distinct from more traditional racing games. And the randomness can allow matches to be slightly different every time based on what you get, when you get it, and how you use it. There are pitfalls in this system, one every game has tried to respond to in its own way, and rarely perfectly. I certainly took my fair share of lumps just collecting images for this piece. But when there’s a balance, in a fun course on which to exploit it, it is a source of endless delight.