Lost Mario Kart game ‘Mario Kart Arcade GP’ and its sequel playable again after a decade of fan work

Nintendo previously released Mario Kart arcade cabinets as part of a partnership with Sega and Bandai Namco. You might have seen them at an arcade but they’ve never been made available on consoles.

However, 2005’s Mario Kart Arcade GP and its 2007 sequel are now playable through Dolphin, an emulator for Nintendo GameCube games.

While those two games never saw console ports, the arcade system they ran on – dubbed Triforce – was built on similar hardware to the GameCube, with the Mario Kart Arcade games using the same engine as GameCube title Mario Kart: Double Dash!!

This was also the same system used for the arcade release of another GameCube racing game, F-Zero GX, which was developed by Sega and can be played nowadays through the Nintendo Switch 2’s GameCube library.

Technically, a different group of fans did get these games running before, but through what is described as ‘suboptimal techniques’ that meant they weren’t entirely stable.