The Blue Shell is the most hated item from all
of Mario Kart. Players from around the world have asked Nintendo to REMOVE
the Blue Shell from the game. And yet, Nintendo haven’t. And that is because
in 1996, the Blue Shell actually solved one of Mario Kart’s biggest problems. Here’s why
Nintendo will never get rid of the Blue Shell. The original Super Mario Kart has some
problems. Namely, that it doesn’t feel very fair. If you fall behind in a race,
it can be really difficult to catch up, and it doesn’t help that the CPU characters
have a huge advantage over you, the player. Let me explain how Super Mario Kart’s
AI works. At the start of a grand prix, the computer players are all given distinct
roles to play. Behaviours that they must follow, whatever happens. There’s one very fast character,
one fast, one medium, one slow, and 3 very slow. And the computer players will do everything
in their power to stay exactly where they are in that list. In other words, the outcome
of each race is entirely predetermined. But what about you, the player?
Well, you start right at the back, and you have to force your way through
that predetermined list, desperately trying to knock the characters off their set
course. It’s not about how well you drive. It’s about how well you disrupt the
computer players from their set order. But, the computer characters don’t just sit
there waiting to be overtaken. They use items to try and stop you. And, this is where the game
goes from unfair to downright cheating. You see, the computer players have access to items that
you don’t. Like, Princess Peach will throw these poison mushrooms onto the track. But there are
no poison mushrooms available in the item panels. Even if you pick Peach as your character,
you can't use the poison mushrooms. But it gets worse. Not only do the computer
players have access to items you can’t use, they can use as many of those items as they want,
whenever they want! That’s right, computer players can spawn infinite items, even if they’ve never
driven over an item panel. So, it’s no surprise that Super Mario Kart’s computer players feel
totally unfair. It’s because they really do cheat. Now, in spite of the game’s unfair AI, Super
Mario Kart went on to become a huge success for Nintendo. And so, a few years later, developers
at the company began working on a sequel, called Mario Kart 64. Now, the developers’ focus
this time round was to fix the big problem with the original game: that if you fell behind,
it was really, really hard to catch up again. Now, there were lots of ways the developers
tried to make sure that ANYBODY could win a race up until the last minute. The CPU
characters, for instance - according to the game’s director Hideki Konno, “The enemy
AI [...] is so much better than before”. Now, better doesn’t necessarily mean fairer - the CPU
in Mario Kart 64 will absolutely still cheat! In fact, a YouTube channel called “superluigikart”
ran an experiment to prove that the computers do cheat. Normally in Mario Kart, the camera
follows you, the player. But in this video, the camera is instead following one of the CPUs,
Luigi. When Luigi gets far enough away from the human player that he can’t be seen anymore, he’ll
disappear. And look at what happens to his speed when that happens! Suddenly, he starts going much
faster, and navigating corners more tightly too. So in Mario Kart 64, computer players only follow
the same rules as the player when the player can see them. As soon as the player can't see them,
they can go faster and they can drive better! But this “cheating” as you might put
it, is all in service of the developers’ goal - to make sure anyone could win
the race up until the final seconds. Unfortunately, there was one big obstacle in the
developers’ way. The Nintendo 64 console itself. You see, Mario Kart 64 was a processor hog. Sure,
Super Mario Kart might have pushed the SNES to its limits, but Mario Kart 64 went well beyond them.
Huge, 3D courses, complicated physics and lots and lots of character sprites really took their toll
on the N64. So, some sacrifices were made to get the game running. Like, the framerate - Super
Mario Kart runs at a smooth 60 frames a second, while Mario Kart 64 only runs at 30. But add in
a second player, and the cracks begin to show. Certain graphical effects like snow
had to be toned down a little to keep the game’s performance consistent. And complex
geometry, like the train from Kalimari Desert, was simplified a little. In this case,
the 5 carriages were chopped down to just one. On the whole though, the game kept
itself running steadily and consistently. But Shigeru Miyamoto had a request
for the programmers. He wanted them to add races with 4 different players. At
first, he was told “that’s impossible”, but eventually, the programmers did manage to pull
it off. Their solution was to slash everything! The frame rate was now down to 20 frames a second.
The clouds in the background layers, these were all removed. Frappe Snowland had its titular snow
taken out. The trees were gone from Moo Moo Farm, and the train from Kalimari Desert
now had no carriages at all. Oh, and on top of that, the
game’s music stopped playing! But, even with all of these changes, the Nintendo
64 console couldn’t pull off something really important. According to the game’s director,
“having eight racers on the screen all the time, didn’t work all that well. So, because the
processing power didn’t exist, we weren’t able to create the racing environment we wanted.” In other
words, the game’s developers wanted to create races that were so close, that anybody could win
them… BUT the Nintendo 64 console had trouble displaying 8 racers on screen at once, which meant
that close races were impossible. Or were they..? You see, the solution to this problem was a little
thing called the Blue Shell. So if you don’t know, the Blue Shell is an item that seeks out the
player in first place and attacks them with a huge explosion. And, this Blue Shell solved
pretty much every problem the developers faced. If one player was lagging behind, they could use
the Blue Shell to attack the first place player, helping themselves to catch up. And if a player
was way out in front of all the other racers, well… the Blue Shell could drag them
back into the battle. This item turned the races from the original Mario Kart, where
if you fell behind, you could never catch up, into races where ANYBODY could
win, and no-one was safe! In the words of the game's director Hideki Konno, “it would enable even whoever was in the back
of the pack to still want to continue the race, to still want to keep going. Something that
would allow them to still have that feeling.” Now, ever since Mario Kart 64, the Blue Shell has
been included in every single Mario Kart game that Nintendo has created. And it’s become hated by
a lot of players. You’re about to win the race, the finish line is in sight, and suddenly a
Blue Shell comes along to crush your dreams. It’s no surprise that some people
find the Blue Shell frustrating. So why won’t Nintendo get rid of it? Well, in an
interview, Hideki Konno explained that every time Nintendo makes a Mario Kart game, the developers
step back, take a look at the game’s balance, and decide which items they include. Which means
that so far, the Blue Shell has continued being useful for balancing out the game, to achieve the
goal of “races where anybody can win”. But don’t take it from me. Let me read out a quote from
Kosuke Yabuki, the man who directed Mario Kart 8. Something I personally really consider is the
human emotion element of the play experience. So for example playing Mario Kart - if
you have something that feels unfair or makes you feel frustrated or makes you angry...
Everyone is different in that respect. What you will feel is unfair might be different to someone
else. As far as possible we want to avoid those feelings of frustration. But because everyone is
different, and it's an emotive thing, you can't pin it down with a set formula. Ultimately, in
the longer term, although everyone might feel on one particular day that they're so frustrated
that they're not going to play any more Mario Kart today - keeping the experience enjoyable
enough so that you might feel like that today, but the next day, the next week, you'll still
go back to Mario Kart and still enjoy it. We're always experimenting with what new elements
to [include] or what elements can be removed. We have tried - or we are trying - to see what the
game's like without the blue shell. When we've experimented without the blue shell, actually
it feels like something's missing. Like there's something not quite enough in the game. So for now
we've kept it in. You know, sometimes life isn't fair. Sometimes in life you have something where
you feel that's not right, and that's frustrating. [But] I think things are more interesting
like that, with the blue shells of life. Hey, this is Thomas, thanks for watching my
video! As always, if you want to see more videos like this then subscribe to my channel,
and a huge thanks to my Patreon supporters for helping make videos like this possible.
Alright, I'll see you next week, bye!
