Okay, but now do housing and groceries and you'll see why people don't have extra money laying around for another Nintendo and its Mario kart.

Economics is significantly more complicated than a bar graph of inflation-adjusted video game price tags lol. Hell, even just value of each game in their respective release time period is more complicated than that. I doubt there's anything unique to this new game (other racing games have done the open world thing several times starting like 15 years ago), but the kart racer genre itself was new back in the 90s.

Edit: these notes have been addressed in OP's post

Note: Salary growth has outpaced inflation.

You know what else has outpaced inflation? The cost of living. Purchasing power for middle and lower class people is far less than what it used to be. "Inflation" doesn't account for that.

this argument is so fucking dumb

Volume of video game sales has changed monstrously over the years as it moved from a niche hobby to mainstream

SNES Mario kart - 8.76 million copies sold worldwide Switch Mario kart 8 - 67.34 million copies sold world wide.

SNES mario kart (inflation adjusted) earnings - 1,095,000,000 Switch Mario kart earnings - 5,252,520,000

Game dev budgets have obviously exploded in that time and nintendo doesn’t disclose their budgets but on average its estimated snes titles got about 1-2 million and switch/wii u titles got 30ish million. That’s a sizable increase in development that wildly outpaces inflation, for sure, but their earnings obviously did too.

But isn’t it easier if I just ignore the nuance of economics and just place all the blame for my unhappiness on corporate greed?

I think it’d also be interesting to see the total production cost of each Mario Kart, and a total sales/revenue generated by each game.

Games are also much easier to distribute now than they ever where, saving cost.

I don’t see Diddy Kong Racing on there which is really the only one you need anyway.

This doesn’t mean anything. Something only has as much value as the customer is willing to pay. People don’t want to pay more than $60 for most new games being released today and companies need to accept that.

Fuck what it cost years ago.

Same goes for everything else. You could make the same argument for cars and trucks which are now reaching $50k USD for base features. Still doesn’t matter. Still overpriced.

Let’s talk about what we’ve lost too. Games used to come as a complete edition. Now you get the game and it’s unplayable on the first day without an update and even then still has features broke, waiting for an update weeks or months later. Not to mention DLC.

Nintendo games never go on sale. And if somebody buys a Switch game, dumps the ROM, and sells it to you, your Nintendo account gets banned because the ID in the header matches the one being distributed over the Internet.

To your edit: Exactly! The only problematic trend I see is that physical copies are getting more scrace.

The thing that graph doesn't take into account is barely anyone payed full price for those older games. Games used to lower prices to increase sales volume and those sale prices are significantly less than $80 even accounting for inflation.

Konami Krazy Racers

I wonder why they didn't got for something like "Konami Krazy Karting"

You have the best list here, but you forgot Wipeout series. Futuristic racing with weapons, set to electronic music.

Crash Team Racing PS1 was IMHO better than Mario Kart N64. The wumpa fruit added a neat dimension, and the ability to select weapons for battle mode was great.

There's a third Sonic racing game called Sonic and SEGA All Stars Racing.

Make sure you put two line breaks between every new line. Otherwise it kinda comes out as a blob. You can also use a dash and a space before each entry to get a bullet point.

Played a copy of Crash Team Racing a bit ago. Had a real good time with it.

Party animals has an almost 1:1 in terms of gameplay ripoff of Mario kart

Out of curiosity: did you partly use AI to make this list? Some of the short descriptions read very oddly for a forum post, e.g. the "various tracks" part on Lego Racers.

Not quite a clone, but Crash Tag Team Racing was a staple of my childhood

Also, Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart

Let's not forget SuperTuxKart!

Wacky wheels was my jam

It's crazy this hasn't happened yet. Kart racers are conceptually very simple games and are all very similar. CTGP kinda does this but is limited by Mario Kart's engine.

I'm still busy enjoying their older consoles. They probably hate that.