Mario Kart World seems to offer racing on reversed tracks

At least judging by a new commercial for the game.
Text: Jonas Mäki
Published 2025-05-28

It feels a little surreal to write it, but next week sees the release of the first new Mario Kart game for a Nintendo console in over eleven years. It was back in May 2014 that Mario Kart 8 launched, and it was followed by the immensely popular Deluxe Edition for Switch in April 2017.

As yet, there's a surprising amount we don't know about what Mario Kart World has to offer, but perhaps a new feature has now been revealed via a Japanese commercial. NintendoSoup notes that Mario Bros. Circuit is running backwards compared to how it looked when it was shown off at Nintendo Treehouse Live (both this and the Japanese video is time-stamped) last month.

We've taken pictures from both videos so you can compare them below. Check out the mini map on the right and you'll see that it's clearly a reverse race. Whether all tracks and game modes can be run this way, we do not know yet, but there is a lot to suggest that we will be able to squeeze the maximum entertainment out of each track by running them both backwards and forwards.

Japanese commercial to the left, Tree House video to the right (pay attention to the minimap).

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