Let’s Rank The Mario Kart Games, From Worst To Best

For over thirty years, we’ve been driving like maniacs, questioning the meaning of fairness and ending friendships in Nintendo’s Mario Kart series. So with Mario Kart World kicking off the Switch 2’s launch this month, why not see if we can end a few more by trying to rank these games from worst to best?

The series has evolved over the years, from a simple racer based on the Mushroom Kingdom to a motorized Smash Bros., drawing in racers and tracks from across the Nintendo universe. And as it’s got older it’s got bigger, going from a mere karting game to something that let us drive quads, bikes, hovercars and even two-seat mobile weapons platforms, and now to a full open world.

As is often the case with Pecking Orders, the idea here isn’t really to rank these games from worst to best, because even the ones down the bottom of the list are still loads of fun. It’s to pit these classics against one another, to not just see which one comes out on top, but why.

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Note that we’ve excluded the arcade games on two grounds: one, that loads of us (and you) haven’t played them, and two, because so much of their content, from tracks to sound effects, is recycled content from mainline games (in a more literal way than newer console games including older tracks).