Chrizum said:
True, but it never had great production values. All Mario Kart titles felt like they were handled by smaller development teams with smaller budgets, compared to other Nintendo franchises. In other words, the games lacked content and polish to be AAA. |
I don't think they lacked polish or content at all. The original introduced a lot of new or relatively new concepts (and did amazing things with the SNES). About the only thing that could steal thunder from the original was F-Zero but F-Zero was pretty no frills for its day. Compare the two and you'll see just how much polish Super Mario Kart had with active environments, weapons, short cuts, battle mode...etc.
I doubt you remember the hype levels for Mario Kart 64 but they were huge. You couldn't open a magazine without finding at least one article about Mario Kart 64 before and after it hit for quite a while.
As a result, Mario Kart is probably one of the most famous racing games in the history of gaming. It is almost the very definition of AAA.







