Nintendo will do anything to avoid making a brand new main-series Mario Kart game, including letting us turn the world into our own private Mario Kart track.
Nintendo made a boatload of announcements this week in regard to how it plans to celebrate Mario’s 35th anniversary. The release of 3D All-Stars, a special edition Game and Watch on which the original Mario Bros. can be played, and even a battle royale version of the game inspired by the very popular Tetris 99.
There was also a new Mario Kart game announced, which is always exciting. Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit. It’s a Mario Kart game unlike any that has come before it because the world is our track. Players use gates to create their own track wherever they like, and an RC car to race around their creations. The car is fitted with a camera, which feeds back to the corresponding Nintendo Switch.
A pretty cool concept, but after we had gotten over it, which didn’t take long, we were left thinking one thing. Nintendo really will do anything to avoid giving us Mario Kart 9. A tweaked version of Mario Kart 8, then a mobile game, and now this. We are crying out for a new Mario Kart game on the Switch (a proper one) and we feel as if we can’t possibly be the only ones.
There is one major reason why this hasn’t happened yet and probably won’t happen any time soon. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe’s continued popularity. The game was released alongside the Switch in 2017 and is yet to leave the console’s weekly top ten selling games. It is the best-selling game on the Switch with more than 26 million copies sold at last count. As is the case with Rockstar and GTA V, if people are still buying and playing the game, why replace it?
So when will we get a new Mario Kart game on Switch that doesn’t require us to buy a bunch of toys in order to play it? Probably never. Nintendo typically releases one Mario Kart game per console, and Switch owners will need to accept that this console’s offering is Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, not Mario Kart 9. For that, we will just have to wait until Nintendo releases a whole new console, and who knows when that might be?
