Mario Kart: Super Circuit[a] is a 2001 kart racing game for the Game Boy Advance (GBA). It is the third Mario Kart game and retains its predecessors’ gameplay: as a Mario franchise character, the player races opponents around tracks based on locales from the Super Mario platform games. Tracks contain obstacles and power-ups that respectively hamper and aid the player’s progress. Super Circuit includes various single-player and multiplayer game modes, including a Grand Prix racing mode and a last man standing battle mode.
Super Circuit was developed by Intelligent Systems and published by Nintendo. It was the first handheld Mario Kart game and the only game in the series developed by Intelligent Systems. Its graphical style changed drastically from early demos, with the final release resembling Super Mario Kart (1992) visually. Nintendo revealed Super Circuit alongside the GBA in 2000 and released it in mid-2001, months after the console’s launch.
Super Circuit received acclaim, with praise for its modes, presentation, gameplay, and difficulty, though responses to the multiplayer were mixed. Retrospectively, critics have ranked it as one of the best GBA games, but one of the lesser Mario Kart games due to its lack of technical innovation compared to its predecessors. It was nominated for several awards and won one. Super Circuit sold 5.91 million copies, making it one of the bestselling GBA games. It was rereleased digitally for the Nintendo 3DS in 2011, the Wii U in 2014, and the Nintendo Switch in 2023.
Gameplay Mario Kart – Super Circuit
Mario Kart: Super Circuit is a kart racing game featuring characters and elements from the Mario franchise. The player controls one of eight Mario characters and races opponents in karts around tracks themed around locales from the Super Mario platform games.[1] Boxes labeled with question marks populate each of the 40 tracks;[2] they give the player a random item based on elements from Super Mario games to help progress. Items can either be power-ups, such as a speed boost, or offensive, such as one that freezes an opponent’s kart in place.[1] Tracks are littered with obstacles that slow the player down,[3] and coins that increase their speed once collected.[2] Each playable character is sorted into one of three weight classes that determine how they play, with heavier characters having higher top speeds but slower acceleration. Princess Peach, Toad, and Yoshi are lightweights; Luigi and Mario are middleweights; and Bowser, Donkey Kong, and Wario are heavyweights.[4] The player chooses from one of three racing styles—50cc, 100cc, or 150cc—before a race, each being progressively faster and more difficult to control.[5]
Super Circuit features three single-playermodes: Grand Prix (GP), Time Trial, and Quick Run.[3] The main racing mode, GP, sees the player race against seven computer opponents around four consecutive circuits, with the objective of placing first in each race. Each set of tracks is part of a “cup”, of which there are 10. Whoever achieves the best overall placements across all four races wins.
The player is graded at the end of the GP based on the number of coins they collected; achieving a high grade on any of the game’s five original cups unlocks a single-player cup from Super Mario Kart (1992).[6] Time Trial allows the player to race on their own to complete a track in the fastest time possible.
The player can compete against another player’s fastest time shared via the Game Boy Advance‘s (GBA) Game Link Cable, a peripheral cable that connects GBA systems
