Mario Kart Double Dash
It can’t be underestimated how important the Mario Kart series is to Nintendo. The games are frequently within the top two or three best selling games on any Nintendo platform. When Mario Kart Double Dash arrived on GameCube it was a big holiday release for the machine and was right up there with Super Smash Bros as the top multiplayer game on the system.
The GameCube did have the ability to go online, but as this was within the early days of consoles adopting online gameplay and Nintendo being Nintendo, they were slow to embrace online. Mario Kart Double Dash featured LAN play which meant you could hook up multiple GameCube systems and multiple TVs and have up to 16 players across 8 machines. As cool as this sounds, outside of comic con style events where they may set something like this up, it was a huge ask of players to have that many machines and copies of the game and controllers and TVs and be able to organise something where they could all come together like that.
The gameplay of the game mixed things up more than almost any entry in the series as you would now have a greatly expanded roster of characters to choose from and would select two characters at a time to be racing with. This would let one character control the kart and the other be in charged of weapons and power ups and you could swap between the characters at the push of a button to take advantage of either character’s special moves.
