Mario Kart 8

This week’s Mario Kart track, GBA Mario Circuit, is a short, simple course. It’s based on the track of the same name from 2001’s Mario Kart: Super Circuit on the Game Boy Advance (this is actually one of the few GBA classic courses to appear in Mario Kart 8), but whereas the original version was a flat, 2D-style circuit with no elevation changes, this new iteration has been dramatically reworked and has had a massive graphical update.

Mario Circuit GBA feels almost like a regular go-kart track, but coloured blocks line the course and, in the background, you’ll see the tall, domed hills characteristic of the Mushroom Kingdom. Close to the finish line, what was once a narrow side road in Mario Kart: Super Circuit has been turned into an actual pit stop, which is a nice detail.

The most obvious feature of the track is, of course, the large U-turn near the beginning, which is slanted and separated from the track to act as an anti-gravity section (as seen in the image at the top of the article). This entire corner chunk of the track is balanced on what appear to be giant car jacks, which rise to lift the section into place as the course starts up. When you’re driving around the anti-gravity section, if you look down into the hole in the ground created by removing an entire slice of track, you may see several Brick Blocks lining the pit – another neat little touch that will probably go unnoticed by the majority of players, who are more focused on the race at hand.

The ‘car jacks’ that raise the track are named ‘Ultra Arms’ – a clear reference to Nintendo’s classic toy, the Ultra Hand, an extendable contraption designed to pick up things from a distance, which was created in 1966 by Gunpei Yokoi. At the time, Yokoi was a maintenance worker who was usually tasked with keeping Nintendo’s hanafuda card assembly lines clean and operational, but in his off time, he often built doodads out of spare parts using his engineering expertise¹. As the holiday season approached, Nintendo’s president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, tasked Yokoi with creating something new and entertaining for the company to sell.

Shortly afterwards, Yokoi showed his boss a retractable claw, which was made of crisscrossing plastic rods. By bringing the two handles together like a large pair of scissors, the pincers extended and clamped down, grasping objects from far away. The ‘Ultra Hand’, as it was called, was very inefficient as a practical tool, but it was fun to use and, when it was sold as a toy, children and adults bought it in droves. The fact that this track features a callback to a piece of obscure Nintendo history that predates Mario is a nice touch.

Next time, we race through the vibrant and beautiful Cheep Cheep Beach.

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1. Gunpei Yokoi would later produce early NES hits such as Metroid and Kid Icarus, but he is perhaps most well-known for creating the Game & Watch handheld system and then, later, designing the Game Boy. ↩︎