Game Theory - Why Mario Kart 8 is Mario's DEADLIEST Game!

Episode Date: April 7, 2023

I've done PLENTY of dark theories on the Mario franchise, from Super Mario being a sociopath to Princess Peach being the dead mother of Rosalina and beyond. But today, I've uncovered the most dangerous game in the Mario canon -- Mario Kart! Mario Kart 8! Well, specifically Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. I did the math, and the devastation those fun little Mario Karts deliver is something to truly fear. So hop in and buckle your seatbelts, because this is going to be one crazy Mario Kart adventure!

I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. But what I do have, a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. I will look for you. I will find you. And I will kill you. Welcome to Game Theory, where we analyze cartoon physics with a seriousness usually reserved for overworked mechanical engineering undergrads. But now, with the release of Mario Card 8 deluxe, uh, should I say re-release of Mario Card 8? No, who am I kidding? No one cared enough about the Wii U to play that thing. Anyway, Mario Card 8, it's out, it's fun, 200cc is brutal, let's theorize. Now at this point you all know how I roll when it comes to Mario theories.

I'm constantly on the lookout for the sickest, scariest, most violent, dangerous, and depraved depths of good old Mario Jumpman Mario's adventures. But even I've gotta admit, Mario Kart 8 may be the single most horrific Mario game out there. And that is saying a lot for this twisted world of Brother rivalries, sociopathic domination, and failing father figures. But I assure you, Internet, that when you do the math, or more accurately, when I do the math, you watch it and then critique it from your couches at home, these carts are death machines. No helmets, no seatbelts, all danger. Surprised about that seatbelt thing, by the way?

Yeah, me too. I thought for sure that Nintendo would need to add that in to remain child friendly or something, but no, they're riding strapless the whole time. Even in that shameless bit of product placement they got in there, the Mercedes, GLA, it's an unlockable cart in the game, it's a car ad. It'd be like if I put a big honkin Mercedes in the video right now and they paid me for it and then I didn't properly Photoshop a seatbelt over my poorly photoshopped body. You know that's really weird. I feel like showing a seatbelt's gotta be a legal requirement for car ads. I mean when I did petchication, which was the thing that I did with Purina like a couple of years ago they had requirements where they couldn't show dogs on bicycles or dogs doing human things or dogs without collars all these individual very specific requirements that we couldn't do either legally or because their brand didn't want us to. So here's a little behind the scenes moment that I thought you guys could enjoy.

Probably the worst looking video, worst sounding video I will ever take and show you guys. I've been researching the script for the last six hours on the plane. I wonder if Nintendo and Mercedes are actually breaking the law by not showing Mario and other characters wearing the seat belt in that GLA car that's in Mario Card 8. So I've been looking it up for, I kid you not, the last 30 to 45 minutes on the airplane Wi-Fi. You can imagine how fun and exciting that's been. But I finally found the right combination of keywords that works. Vehicle advertising, and they say driving practices or any other breaches of the law.

You have to show proper driving etiquette. So you have to use fog lights. You have to use brakes, indicate changing lanes, and of course, using seatbelts. So what that means is that, yeah, Nintendo and Mercedes actually are breaking the law with their GLA promotion in Mario Car 8. So, not a bad start to things. But what I really want to know is, is it deadly? And just how deadly is it?

Well, you know, whenever we gotta figure out something like that, it means only one thing! Time to call in the pixel measurements. Thankfully, MarioCard 8 Deluxe runs at 60 frames per second, which means that our measurements are going to be twice as accurate as they would have been otherwise. Now, in order to get a precise measurement, we're going to need some objective points of reference. Which is actually surprisingly easy to find in Mario Kart because Mario is in it. And I know what you're gonna say, trust me, I've had my fair share of Babel over Mario's height at this point and Odyssey is a weird entry in the series but after the official Nintendo costume of Mario crashed our GT live video about one-two switch and I measured him to be in real time at that moment

155 centimeters or 5 foot 11 inches no way no way which just so happens to be also what Nintendo says his cannon height is I am convinced good old Mario 5 foot 11 inches from here on out to the end of eternity serving as a semi-reliable ruler in game theory videos for half a decade. Anyway, knowing that, we can use its height to measure just about anything we want to in this world. Say for instance the checkers on the starting line, which are all the same size getting us a finish line that's 138 centimeters wide. From there, all we have to do is cross that finish line at top speed, look at how many frames it takes to do it, and then output that into an official speed, which for regular old Mario on a regular old cart gets us a regular old speed of 35.57 meters per second or more useful 128 kilometers an hour.

Since I'm American imperialist scum, that number means nothing to me. So, let me convert that to miles per hour and... Holy balls! That's almost 80 miles per hour! I... Wow! That's just really fast. Like, faster than most highways fast.

I mean, geez Nintendo, first the seatbelt thing and now this. Kids play this game, you know? You really want to set the example of irresponsibly zipping around a track, launching projectiles at each other, at speeds faster than most highways with no seatbelt, no helmet, and a vehicle with no sides? Forget Mario Kart double dash? It's Mario Kart Fury Road. It's Mario Cart Death Race. It's Mario Cart I have no more movie references to put here. Fast and Furious, Fast and Furious. Mario Kart Fast and Furious! So my first thought here is no way. There is no way a Go-Cart could possibly go this fast, but I kept digging

and believe it or not, there are actual carts that can go up to speeds of up to 200 kilometers or about 124 miles per hour. A hundred and twenty four miles per hour and get this, they're used for actual cart races. Souped up supercarts blasting around tracks at over a hundred miles per hour. In other words, Mario Kart is a real sport. Man, a mat pat, I hear you saying. If these guys are going so fast, why are you making such a big deal about how dangerous Mario Kart is? Last time I checked, I didn't see a dateline special about the horrific deaths of high-speed cart racers.

To which I say to you, commenter, you watch Dateline? What are you? Like 75? But to answer your question, there are actually two big differences between the cart bros and the Mario Bros. First, the track. Rarely are there walls that are right next to the road in these real-life races. Usually there's a long patch of grass that allows drivers enough time to slow their speeds down enough, so they're not smacking into the walls at top speeds. Also, it's really difficult for them to hit a wall straight on, which means that the wall is going to absorb just a smaller bit of that impact force. Oh, and Also, there aren't sentient stone monsters whose sole purpose in life is to crush you in the middle of your fun-loving death race So there's also that

Secondly, these supercart racers are wearing a ton of protective gear Helmets have been shown to reduce the strength of impacts to the skull by factors of over a thousand and for everything else there's riding leathers You thought those outfits high-speed motorcyclists wear are just to look cool and increase their aerodynamic flow? Nope! Those leather body suits can save lives. So let's get sciencey if you take To account the coefficient of friction, which is literally just the ratio of the force of friction between two bodies, in this case Asphalt and your delicate human flesh, the results of high-speed sliding are disgusting For every mile per hour that you're going over 30 or every 1.6 kilometers per hour that you're going over 48, Just slightly above the speeds in most school zones, should you hit the ground and slide to a stop, you're gonna lose one millimeter of yourself.

Since the average thickness of human skin is 1.3 millimeters, at 31 miles per hour, you hit the ground You're looking at losing most of the skin that's covering up your delicate inner parts Hitting the ground at our in-game speed of 80 miles per hour. That's five centimeters Two inches of your body ground into the pavement like some sort of horrific cheese grater Here's a finger to represent it. Edward go in and show what two inches off of a finger will look like just round away Gross gross and disgusting And that's just the top speed of the basic cart with the most basic Italian plumber driving it.

No offense to Mario, but there are a lot faster drivers out there with a lot better carts. So I went in and ran all the characters through our little speed test here on a variety of different cart setups. And from our testing, Dry Bowser and a B charger with slick wheels, a super glider, and ten coins, yielded the fastest setup without using any items, reaching top speeds of up to 180 kilometers per hour, or well over a hundred and ten. 10 miles per hour. Oh, now we're talking. So I had myself a little thinky-think and came up with the following thought question,

because writing the show has gradually warped my mind into a perverse what-if machine. What if? We took the fastest speeds in the game and put the wittledliest drivers behind the wheel, then got into a crash. Who's gonna get into a crash? Who's gonna get into a crash? Yeah, you are baby Peach, Baby Daisy, and Baby Rosalina. If there was ever a reason for these babies to wet their diapers, this would be it.

You see, I measured them up and the babies are about 60 centimeters or 24 inches tall. And at speeds that high, you'd be losing 7 centimeters or 3 inches from your body. In other words, in a crash, 1 eighth of that child would be rubbed off on the concrete, like a human eraser. We're no longer talking about just skin, we're talking skin, muscle, bone, and if you're a super unlucky, vital organs, Which is what we call a skin abulgent. It's like a scraped knee, but on steroids. Why are we letting babies? Babies with way less skin than the rest of us, by the way, drive these things. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to Game Theory, the only show where gruesome child murder is a regular part of our programming lineup. Actually, no, you know what? No, it's not me. It's the games. It's these video games.

Don't blame the messenger, guys. I just do the horrific math and bring the gruesome truths of these dark-twisted games like Mario Kart to lights. But when Nintendo's cutsy animations are covering up are the horrific consequences of every time you plow into that moo-moo in the meadow. Want to know what happens when you run into a wall headfirst at a hundred miles per hour? Well, I don't have the budget to show you. But luckily, I know some people who can show you. Two of my most manly of crushes, the Mythbusters, took a bunch of cars and plowed them into a wall at a hundred miles per hour because that's what you do when TV gives you a butt ton of cash. You just blow up stuff.

Are you ready for some more wanton destruction? And this is what happened. It's half its original size! And remember engineers have spent decades perfecting the car to protect the driver. Carts? They got none of that. No bumpers, no airbags, no crumple tech. So, you know, try to avoid hitting those thwamps and pillars because you are absolutely murdering your driver every time you do. They're experiencing over 2,000 Gs, 2,000 times the force of Earth's gravity when you're going from 100 miles per hour to zero in a split second. And 2,000 Gs is more than enough to rip your organs to shreds. and shatter your bones to splinters. You know, I wish. I wish I did the sound effects for these games because here's what the game would look like with my

Sound direction. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no No about minor collisions. The little bumps that don't stop you dead in your tracks, in a very literal sense as we just learned, but instead just slow you down a bit or running into a different driver. I mean angles matter. Sometimes you just graze off the side. Well, put your questions to rest because us here at theorist labs by using a combination of trigonometry, algebra, and you Ye-oldy pixel measurements developed a formula, a real-life true-to-form formula, kind of like Einstein, but a lot less impressive and a lot less importance Using exhaustive collision tests in-game that will output your speed reduction experience Depending on the angle that you hit the wall or other character apps. Loyal theorists do you see the depths of nerdy that we got to for this episode So if you take Mario's comparatively modest speed of 80 miles per hour or 128 kilometers per hour and barely graze a wall at just a five-degree

angle, he'll still be experiencing a speed reduction of 20 miles per hour. That's 32.4 kilometers per hour in just a fraction of a second. And drastic changes like that prompt huge amounts of G forces. He's gonna feel 25 times the force of gravity working on his body in that instant. It's certainly not enough to be fatal, but he's not gonna be feeling too great. And remember that is a five degree brushing of a wall. So let's take it to a logical extreme. So let's say you're a baby Daisy who's traveling at Dry Bowser-like speeds who irresponsibly downs herself a mushroom, an item which instantaneously doubles your speed, then all of a sudden you couldn't make that turn because there are never enough straightaways in a Mario Kart game to effectively use a mushroom in the first place, so you inevitably hit a wall traveling over 200 miles

per hour, glancing off of it at a much more aggressive 30 degrees. Well, baby is gonna have herself a big boo-boo. We're talking a speed reduction of almost 40% and a force of over a hundred and fifteen Gs. Consider for a moment that fighter pilots, you know, people whose literal job it is to tolerate high G forces are trained to withstand a mere nine. Nine G's. How is a regular adult tolerating this, let alone a newborn baby racer? And this is all because the walls in Mario Kart don't yield at all, whereas the walls

in most racetracks in the real world are designed to crumple, absorbing energy and slowing you down. But oh no, my friends, not in the happy-go-lucky mushroom king's. You're basically running into a solid cement wall in Mario Kart and that thing ain't gonna collapse You are. Oh yeah, but I forgot you're not wearing seat belts. So instead of crumpling up with the rest of the car, you're just gonna fly head first into that cement wall Becoming a decorative red splotch on the side of Royal Raceway.

And I know what you're thinking. All of this. All of this is ignoring items like banana peals, red shells, blue shells, speed boosters, and literal bombs. For now, the true point of today is that Mario Kart is with without question, one of the single most straight-up violent games that you've ever played. Let that sink in next time your power sliding around Rainbow Road. Consider your childhood ruined. And remember, that's just a theory.

A game theory! Thanks for watching!