Crash Team Racing or Sonic and his All-Stars may be easier to play in the modern climate thanks to more rounded graphics and fully 3D game engines, but we wouldn't even have them if SMK didn't set everything in motion. That's besides the fact that although gameplay might look ridiculously primitive in any screenshots, playing the original Mario Kart and getting the hang of just how much you can swing the track around your rider is a sensation totally unique to this entry in the series. A technical marvel at its time, the courses themselves are the only thing that's rendered in 3D, as due to the technical limitations of the SNES, Nintendo really had to think outside the box to get their vision of a split-screen racer to fruition. That meant keeping the racers and tokens on the tracks in 2D, whilst essentially letting you rotate the polygonal track around your character - meaning when you're steering left, you're actually 'pushing' the course right; hence why your kart never moves from the centre of the screen. Pretty incredible, no?
