If I’m being totally honest, I don’t love Mario Kart. I’ve owned every entry in the series and played the hell out of all of them, but it’s not the kind of game I return to all the time. I’ll break it out for an hour at Christmas to play with the cousins after dinner, then I don’t think about it again until next Thanksgiving.
I got to play Mario Kart World at the Nintendo Switch 2 Experience in Los Angeles last week, and after just an hour behind the wheel, I saw something I’ve never seen in Mario Kart before. The interconnected tracks are neat, the costumes are funny, and exploring the open world with friends will be a blast, but the thing that really sets Mario Kart World apart is the new Knockout Tour. Not only is it Mario Kart’s most intense game mode, but with the right format it has serious esports potential.
If You’re Not First, You’re Last
Knockout Tour is so much more interesting than its simple premise would suggest. Players race on a tour of interconnected tracks, and at the completion of every lap, the last four players are eliminated. It starts with 24 racers, but only the top 20 continue the race after the first lap. Then it goes to 16, then 12, eight, and finally the last four take one final lap to determine the winner.
If you play a lot of racing games, this will be a familiar game mode. In fact, Knockout Tour is nearly identical to Need For Speed’s Knockout Races. It’s not an original idea, but there’s a good reason we haven’t seen it in any of the previous eight Mario Kart games: it needs one long track to really work.
Previous Mario Karts have had a few tracks that don’t loop around each lap, instead designed as one long race from point A to point B; Big Blue and Mount Wario come to mind. In Mario Kart World, every track is like this. This is how it’s able to connect all of the tracks together in one tour.
That makes a huge difference in Knockout Tour. Without any loops around the track the sense of urgency is increased because you always have the feeling of being chased. You have a destination in mind and you have to be the first one to get there. With each lap you’re facing new terrain and challenges, and it’s much harder to learn the routes – and for those routes to go stale.
I love the intensity of Knockout Tour. Even at 100cc, the entire race is intense from start to finish. There’s no catching up from last place at the last minute because you have to constantly be at the front of the pack to not get eliminated. It’s a ton of fun, and if Nintendo is willing to support it, it will make a great competitive mode too.
A Mario Kart Battle Royale
Apex Legends’ competitive series, ALGS, has the perfect format for Knockout Tour. Here’s how it works: 20 teams of three play multiple rounds, accumulating points for every kill, with bonus points awarded based on how long the team survives. Once a team has earned 50 points, they can win the tournament by winning a single round. The longer the tournament goes on, the more teams will reach 50 points and be eligible to win. Eventually someone has to win, and the closer you get to that eventuality, the more exciting it is.
Knockout Tour can borrow this exact format – minus the killing. After each tour, racers earn points based on their placement – that’s already baked into Mario Kart’s Tour format. Once a racer has reached a certain point threshold, all they have to do is come in first in the next tour to win. Just like Apex Legends, the more racers that reach that match point without a winner, the more intense the races become.
I enjoy this format a lot in the ALGS because it’s great for spectators. It’s easy to follow the top-performing teams early on, and watching match after match, you start to recognize each team’s unique strategies. It’s easy to draw storylines out of this format because rivalries happen naturally and upsets are common. It works great for Apex Legends, and it would work great for Mario Kart, too.
Nintendo doesn’t have a great history of supporting organized play. Outside of Pokemon, all of the other competitive communities that play Nintendo games are entirely grassroots. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate hasn’t even played at EVO for years – though you can kind of understand why Nintendo would distance itself from the Smash community.
Clearly Nintendo has had some reservations about supporting competitive formats in the past, but that doesn’t mean it has to be that way forever. A new console is a great time to turn a new leaf, and what better way to build some long-term engagement with Mario Kart World than to launch an official esports circuit? Even if Nintendo won’t do it, I hope someone will.
Mario Kart World
- Released
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June 2, 2025
- ESRB
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Everyone // Mild Fantasy Violence, Users Interact
- Developer(s)
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Nintendo
- Publisher(s)
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Nintendo
- Multiplayer
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Local Multiplayer, Online Multiplayer
- Number of Players
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1-24