Mario Kart World Is For The Speedrunning Freaks (And Everyone Else Too)
When people think of Mario Kart, certain images come to mind: friends huddled around a TV, most of whom are using those uncomfortable little half-JoyCon controllers, laughing and yelling as curses fly, Blue Shells soar, and somebody gets repeat visits from Lakitu because they keep messing up their drifts on Rainbow Road (me). Mario Kart is first and foremost a party game, one with relatively simple controls and generous comeback mechanics designed to keep everyone having fun with the frantic shenanigans.
Specifically, it’s built around “rubberbanding,” which means that if a player falls behind, they’ll receive powerful items, such as Bullet Bills and Blue Shells, that help them catch up. I’m not saying this as an insult: this element is the secret sauce that makes each lap a blast when you’re playing with friends, because it feels like anyone can come out on top.
The latest entry in the series, Mario Kart World, maintains all of this. On the surface, its biggest additions are the open-world elements, which connect each course via interstitial highways that you traverse as part of a circuit. There’s also a free roam mode where you can explore this space, alongside the all-new Knockout Tour, a high-intensity gauntlet that eliminates the lowest place players every few checkpoints. However, while these are the most outwardly noticeable alterations to this long-running series, something more subtle is the largest change this time around for the hardest of the hardcore: the new movement techniques.
There are three big new features when it comes to the game’s otherwise simple core controls. There’s the Charge Jump, where if you hold the acceleration and drift buttons at the same time while driving in a straight line, your car will squat low to the ground. When you release, you’ll jump in the direction your left stick is pointed. Next, there’s Rail Riding, which as the name suggests, means you can ride rails placed throughout tracks to get a speed boost. Lastly, there’s the Wall Ride, where if you Jump Boost or Charge Jump into a wall, you’ll drive along it for a short while.
At first glance, they don’t seem that game-changing: Charge Jumps make you move a bit slower and drive in a straight line to set them up. Rails are nice when you can find them, but they only shine if you’re also performing tricks off them, which can easily throw you off the stage if you mess up. And Wall Riding is very hard to do without an encyclopedic knowledge of each level. For casual players like myself and most of the rest of the game’s audience, these additions are cool when you pull them off, but are somewhat of an afterthought in the grand scheme of things.
Of course, this is very different for the people who live and breathe Mario Kart, who close their eyes and see a flying Wario bouncing from wall to wall before letting loose a sick grind that would have Tony Hawk jealous. These seemingly simple tools—jumping, grinding rails, and riding walls—have completely changed the game for top-level players, particularly speedrunners, who started ingeniously combining these techniques within days of the game’s release. Here’s an example of a particularly absurd shortcut from NMead’s world record run on Whistlestop Summit that demonstrates what I mean:
As for what’s going on here, NMead uses a drift to get a boost that lets them jump over a gap, and then does a series of grinds, wall rides, and tricks to position themself on top of a wall, where they perform tricks on the rail to get a final bit of speed. Somehow, this process is even harder than it looks.
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