Mario Kart 8

The first track of the Flower Cup in Mario Kart 8 is Mario Circuit, a lush green landscape centred around Peach’s Castle. The track itself is a twisting road suspended above a grassy canyon, carved into the shape of a ‘Möbius strip’, which is basically a single-surface figure-eight. This is not only a unique and clever way to show off the new anti-gravity mechanic in Mario Kart 8, but, as a bonus, since it looks like the number ‘8’, it also ties into the game’s numeric title very nicely. I love the fact that parts of this track are connected to the ground via big metal support beams (you can see some in the bottom left of the image above), which apparently keep the whole course in place – even though there are islands floating in midair, completely unsupported, in the background. But hey, the logic of the Mushroom Kingdom has always been all over the place.

It’s hard to miss Princess Peach’s Castle on this course, with its characteristic pink roof, but there’s also a little neighbourhood of cute Toad Houses to see as you’re hurtling around. These mushroom-shaped buildings first appeared in Super Mario Bros. 3 and have since appeared in many Super Mario games, usually on every world map except for the last. Toad Houses always hold either a useful surprise or a reward for the player, most frequently power-ups. I can’t imagine the noise from all the kart racing on this circuit makes for a particularly relaxing existence for the Toads living here.

Also of note on Mario Circuit is the building located at the start/finish line. If you look closely, you will see, behind the jumping and cheering Toads, lots of ‘?’ Blocks (a few are visible in the image below). Perhaps this is one of the places where these blocks are stored until they need to be deployed elsewhere in the Mushroom Kingdom.

There are a couple of classic Mario enemies to be aware of when zooming around Mario Circuit. Pipes can be seen along the side of the course, inhabited by Piranha Plants, so be mindful of how close you are to them when drifting around corners. And in certain parts of the circuit, Goombas wander onto the track; there are even Goomba Towers, which are several Goombas standing on top of each other.

Goombas are squat, brown, mushroom-like creatures with furrowed brows, a pair of tusk-like teeth, and two stubby feet (but no arms). They are distantly related to Toads, but many of them defected to Bowser’s army when he first invaded the Mushroom Kingdom. Although they appear in almost every Mario game, Goombas were, in fact, the very last enemy to be created during the development process of Super Mario Bros. back in 1985. For most of the game’s development, the only basic enemy was the Koopa Troopa. However, play-testers stated that the Koopa Troopa was too tricky an enemy to have as the first one encountered by new players. Using this feedback, the developers decided to create an enemy that could be defeated with just a single stomp. Since this was very close to the end of the development cycle, hardly any bytes remained on the cartridge, so this new enemy – the Goomba, which was more of an obstacle than a monster – was given a straightforward, mushroom-like design. Due to limited NES memory space, the team created a single Goomba sprite and flipped it horizontally to simulate walking – a classic example of constraints driving iconic design.

If you asked a Japanese person what they thought a Goomba was based on, they might well say ‘a chestnut’. Indeed, in 2012, then-president of Nintendo, Satoru Iwata, was surprised to learn from Takashi Tezuka, a senior developer on several Mario games throughout the years, that Goombas were based on mushrooms, having always viewed them as walking chestnuts. This discrepancy exists because, although Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto had always considered these characters to be ‘evil shiitake mushrooms’, a programmer working on Super Mario Bros. insisted that they looked more like chestnuts. And so they were given the Japanese name Kuribō, which comes from kuri, the Japanese word for ‘chestnut’; and bō, an affectionate suffix essentially meaning ‘guy’ or ‘boy.’ The name stuck – and, as a result, a lot of Japanese players always saw them as chestnuts, even if the setting of Super Mario Bros. is the Mushroom Kingdom.

The English name Goomba, meanwhile, may come from the Italian slang term goombah, which derives from the word compà, meaning ‘companion’. Because Mario and Luigi had already been given Italian names, Nintendo of America chose an Italian-American term to rename this minor enemy character. Appropriately enough, although goombah can be a term of affection among Italians, it can also be used to refer to members of a criminal gang – the mafia in the real world, and Bowser’s army in the Mushroom Kingdom.

Next time, we’re heading down to the sea, to race around the picturesque coastal town of Toad Harbour.