Nintendo is releasing a major free update for Mario Kart World, introducing 10 new race courses. These tracks are directly based on courses from the seminal Super Mario Kart, the first game in the franchise released for the SNES in Japan on August 27, 1992. The new additions include fan-favorite maps such as Choco Island 1 and 2, Vanilla Lake, and Ghost Valley. These courses were previously inaccessible, existing only within the game's open world, but will now be fully playable in VS Race mode.
Super Mario Kart achieved significant success, becoming the SNES's fourth-best-selling game with 8.76 million copies sold worldwide. It has since seen re-releases on the Wii's Virtual Console and the Super NES Classic Edition.
In addition to the classic courses, the 1.8.0 update for Mario Kart World will also add two new routes to the KO Tour mode: Propeller Rally and Turnip Rally. KO Tour, a mode introduced in Mario Kart World, functions similarly to a battle royale, where a large number of players race and those in the rear are progressively eliminated.
Mario Kart World launched on June 5, 2025, alongside the Nintendo Switch 2. The game has sold 15.3 million copies, though player reception has been mixed. While the core racing mechanics have been praised for their responsive design, the game's open-world structure has drawn criticism. Players found the stretches between traditional tracks to be unengaging, and an earlier workaround to favor random stages online was patched out. Nintendo did make adjustments to some of the open-world segments to address these concerns, which were moderately well-received but did not entirely resolve the issue. Despite these criticisms, Mario Kart World has proven to be a commercial success for Nintendo.
