At long last, the Nintendo Switch 2 has been made official, and a new Mario Kart game is unsurprisingly accompanying the console. There are very little details about Mario Kart 9 (which probably won’t even be its title), but the Switch 2 reveal trailer featured a little footage from the new game, with more info coming later in the year. There’s obviously a lot of excitement for this new Mario Kart installment. That said, one can’t help but be disappointed by the fact that Mario Kart is on its ninth game while arguably the best first-party racing game from the Nintendo 64 era never got a single sequel.
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The game in question is none other than Diddy Kong Racing, the 1997 hit from Rare that remains the only true kart-racing rival to Mario’s series.
If you’re unfamiliar, Diddy Kong Racing is a kart racer that was released exclusively on the Nintendo 64 (later re-released on the Nintendo DS) and centered around the longtime side kick of Donkey Kong. Really, though, Diddy Kong is just one of the playable racers in the game and the whole world of Donkey Kong doesn’t play a factor in the game itself.
Diddy Kong Racing, unfortunately, wasn’t able to become a massive franchise like Mario Kart, and it’s not because the game isn’t great. Everything attached to Rare is complicated, as the company was eventually bought by Microsoft, and most of its original creations have had essentially no life since.
But when you think about those great Rare characters (save for the ones in Donkey Kong), the two most popular of the bunch actually began in Diddy Kong Racing. In addition to Diddy Kong, the playable racers in the lineup included a bear with a backpack named Banjo, and a wise-cracking squirrel named Conker. Of course, those two characters went on to headline games of their own, which are still to this day amongst the most beloved titles ever released on N64. Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie, and Conker’s Bad Fur Day are darlings to longtime N64 fans, and they wouldn’t exist without Diddy Kong Racing.
More important than being a launching pad for incredible Rare characters, Diddy Kong Racing is jut a revolutionary kart racing game. Unlike Mario Kart, Diddy Kong Racing found a way to merge a classic racer with elements of a 3D platformer to create something unique at the time.
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The game begins with you being dropped into an open world, riding a go-kart, and tasked with exploring until you find a place you can race. Similar to games like Banjo-Kazooie or Super Mario 64, you need to earn certain tokens (in this case balloons) from winning levels in order to open doors to more difficult worlds. The races come in sets, with each set existing in its own unique world, all of them culminating in some sort of boss race.
This gave Diddy Kong Racing the ability to shove monotony aside, as each new set of races basically took you somewhere completely different. You start racing through a prehistoric world of dinosaurs, then head off into the snow for another series. When the bosses are introduced, they appear as characters in a story, rather than just someone you have to beat in a race. Each of them has their own voice, motive, and set of skills that sets them apart from one another. To put it differently, each of the bosses is wholly memorable, much like they would be in a traditional 3D platformer type of game.
On top of all that, Diddy Kong Racing utilizes different kinds of vehicles, adding planes and hovercraft to the traditional karts. This allows for unique experiences on each different track, keeping the game fresh as you try to explore everything it has to offer.
We know why Diddy Kong Racing never got a sequel, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a huge bummer. In a world where Mario Kart has nine mainline installments, most of which haven’t strayed from the tried and true racing formula of the original, it’s disappointing we haven’t had another chance to explore what other new innovations the world of Diddy Kong Racing could’ve had to offer.
