Forget Mario Kart or Kirby Riders, I’m Dying for This Nintendo Kart Racer to Come Back

There have been plenty of kart racing games over the years, with plenty of video game developers trying to unseat the Mario Kart series as the king of the genre. Crash Bandicoot, Sonic the Hedgehog, and plenty of crossover titles have brought together massive cartoonish rosters, but it’s rare that one of the games can actually match Mario Kart. Notably, two of the best competitors Mario Kart has ever faced in this way both come from Nintendo.

Kirby Air Riders was a cult classic when it hit the GameCube, but it found renewed life on the Switch 2 and became a perfect complementary peer to the latest entry in the Mario Kart franchise. However, another iconic Nintendo character took the lead of their own kart racing game in 1997 that quickly became one of the Nintendo 64’s biggest surprise hits. Now, almost thirty years later, it’s worth looking back at how Diddy Kong Racing innovated the genre and how well a modern remake would fit into the current gaming space.

How Diddy Took To The Road, Skies, And Rivers

Diddy Kong Racing remains one of the most entertaining kart racing games ever, and I’ve been dying for a follow-up for almost thirty years. After the success of Killer Instinct 2, Rare and Nintendo decided to continue their partnership with a new game. While the team that worked on the previous fighting game was split in two, half of them moved into a different title. Going through various potential projects — including a prehistoric RTS and an adventure game inspired by Disney World called Adventure Racers — and eventually moved towards Pro-Am 64, a racing game based on the NES title R.C. Pro-Am.

Taking cues from their more cartoonish concepts for Adventure Racers, the team established a racing game with larger maps that could be explored mid-race. When Banjo-Kazooie was delayed and left incomplete coming into the 1997 holiday season, the concept for Adventure Racers was tweaked so that Diddy Kong — who had become a recognizable part of the Nintendo canon of characters thanks to his playable role in two of the Donkey Kong Country games — could take the lead role. The game even received a story mode focusing on Timber the Tiger, who recruits Diddy and a number of other racers to help contend with the intergalactic pig-wizard known as Wizpig, who has invaded his home island.

Diddy Kong Racing was quickly finished by a small but dedicated team, officially launching in November of 1997, making it the sole major Nintendo 64 release for the season. Luckily, the game proved to be a hit with critics and audiences alike. The game scored a cumulative 88/100 from MetaCritic, with critics at the time embracing the fully 3D graphics and fluid gameplay. Thanks in part to a lack of direct competition from other N64 releases, Diddy Kong Racing sold phenomenally well, eventually selling 4.5 million copies worldwide and going on to become one of the best-selling games on the console. It was a blast and quickly proved to be a worthy rival to Mario Kart 64.

A Modern Diddy Kong Racing Could Be Amazing

While Mario Kart remains the gold standard of kart racers (especially on Nintendo) and in-house competitors like Kirby Air Riders are a blast, Diddy Kong Racing was exactly the unique peer that Mario Kart needed. Diddy Kong had a greater emphasis on story, a more expansive world to actually explore in a solo campaign, and introduced other vehicles as a way of breaking up the gameplay loop. While the core racing mechanics were inherently similar to the basic racing structure of something like Mario Kart 64, the game was able to expand on the premise by adding new elements, especially to other modes like the combat mode, which benefits greatly from the plane mode.

The bosses that players have to defeat in races or combat added a genuine single-player experience that paid off in the larger game. Diddy Kong Racing was also just a blast, another reminder that Nintendo and Rare were one of those unique gaming partnerships where the design impulses behind both companies lined up perfectly. In an era where kart racers like Mario Kart World have opened up a plethora of possibilities about where the genre could go, it’s a shame we never got to see what Diddy Kong Racing could have grown into.

There were multiple proposed sequels, including Donkey Kong Racing for the GameCube and Diddy Kong Pilot for the Game Boy Advance. However, both games ended up tweaked or cancelled. While there was a remake for the Nintendo DS, it wasn’t as well-received as the original. A modern Diddy Kong Racing game could use the benefits of modern game design to create larger worlds to explore. The way Mario Kart World incorporates larger exploration and massive boss battles feels directly in line with what Diddy Kong Racing was playing with decades ago. While it seems unlikely that we’ll ever see a direct follow-up to Diddy Kong Racing, it could do a lot for the genre that it helped push forward.