Mario Kart DS
The first Mario Kart you could play against strangers: Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, friend codes and all, in November 2005. Sixteen new tracks, sixteen retro ones, eight-player races off a single cartridge, and a drifting trick called snaking that split every online lobby.
Nintendo announced a DS Mario Kart on May 11, 2004 and let the public play it at the 2005 Game Developers Conference, wireless racing included. Producer Hideki Konno's team at Nintendo EAD built it in full 3D at a steady 60 frames per second. Konno noted that Halo's online crowd was mostly "hardcore gamers"; with this one he wanted "everyone to go online," and he brought back tracks from older games so that people who had started with Super Mario Kart on the Super Nintendo would feel at home.
The cartridge held 32 courses in eight cups, half new and half retro: Waluigi Pinball, Airship Fortress and Tick-Tock Clock on the Nitro side, Baby Park from Double Dash among the returns. Twelve racers included Dry Bones, Waluigi and R.O.B., each with three karts. A Mission mode sat beside Grand Prix, Time Trial, Versus and Battle, and up to eight DS owners could race locally off one cartridge, the cartridge-less players stuck as Shy Guy. Online, through the new Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, four could race at once. It launched in North America on November 14, 2005, with a red DS bundle and a checkered-flag wrist strap following two weeks later.
Metacritic's 91 made it one of the highest-rated DS games ever, and IGN's Craig Harris called it the best kart racer ever made. GameSpy praised "pixel-perfect" controls and called eight-player local races "pure gaming nirvana," while Eurogamer and Nintendo Power complained about rubber-band AI and blue shells. The online mode drew the most argument: friend codes, no lobby, no talking, four players at most. In its first week in the US, 112,000 people bought it and 52,000 of them went online. Within weeks players had worked out that power-sliding from one side of a straight to the other, over and over, chained boosts into a huge lead. The technique was called snaking; one Nintendo of America staffer was quoted calling it simply part of the game, online races were being won by a minute or more, and many players called it a cheap way to win.
It was the best-selling handheld game of its launch month, the best-selling DS game of 2008, and by March 2016 had sold 23.6 million copies, behind only New Super Mario Bros. and Nintendogs on the DS and only Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Mario Kart Wii in its own series. GamesRadar named it the best DS game of all time. The Wi-Fi Connection servers went dark on May 20, 2014; the game resurfaced on the Wii U Virtual Console the following year.
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