{"id":1679,"date":"2025-07-07T02:12:41","date_gmt":"2025-07-07T06:12:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/?p=1679"},"modified":"2025-07-08T00:09:25","modified_gmt":"2025-07-08T04:09:25","slug":"a-beginning-at-a-geoguessr-style-look-at-the-mario-kart-world-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/?p=1679","title":{"rendered":"A Beginning at a GeoGuessr-style Look at the Mario Kart World… World"},"content":{"rendered":"

Where is Mario Kart World?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

I enjoy GeoGuessr.\u00a0 For anyone who has not heard of it, it is a geography game that uses Google Street View images to ask you, where in the world are you?\u00a0 Or rather, where in the largely road-based 80-ish countries that Google has driven for Street View are you?\u00a0 It is a memory game both about actual road and national information and about learning which Google camera and car took the photosphere.\u00a0 That latter part is critically important, unfortunately; at higher levels, GeoGuessr is not really about learning real-world information, but instead is about learning which cameras, cars, and years Google used in each place.\u00a0 Even so, it’s a great game that I quite enjoy even if I’ll never be great at it.<\/p>\n

So perhaps it is unsurprising that when playing Mario Kart World, I thought… where is this place?\u00a0 Based on the road markings and such, where is Mario Kart World in our world? The answer is kind of interesting: it is nowhere, but also is a lot of places.<\/p>\n

When it comes to road markings, in MKW Nintendo went with a very strange road line configuration that I do not believe any country on Earth uses.\u00a0 First, MKW has a right-side driving direction.\u00a0 Nintendo is a Japanese company so perhaps Japan’s left-side driving direction could have been expected, but they try to make their games with broad international appeal, so going with the American and Continental European right-side standard makes sense.\u00a0 Despite this, a lot of the road signage and color choices are Japanese-based, as we will see.<\/p>\n

The Roads and Road Lines<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Roads in MKW often change surface from one instant to the next in a way that a real road wouldn’t.\u00a0 This makes the game more visually interesting so I’m all for it, but it is amusing when a paved road randomly turns to sand for a bit before turning back to pavement or tile or something for a block… heh.<\/p>\n

As for the road lines, the game has general trends but some areas are exceptions to them.\u00a0 There is a usual continent-wide road coloring system, but some areas do their own thing, probably to add variety to the game or because the creators thought it would be interesting or something.\u00a0 The results are strange.<\/p>\n

Two lane, two-way paved roads in MKW usually have white lines on each side and a white dashed line in the center, as you see in many European countries and also sometimes see in Japan in two lane roads.\u00a0 Okay.\u00a0 Some areas have an additional color along the side, either red or green, alongside the white, and the gas stations along your route with their food stands have yellow outside lines on their pulloff, but otherwise two lane paved roads always have white outside lines.\u00a0 In Japan you sometimes see a single yellow center line and sometimes see a single white, but in the game they almost always went with white.<\/p>\n

However, this rule is not absolute.\u00a0 Yellow center lines can be found in certain areas, for reasons only the designers would know.\u00a0 There is a small group of two-lane roads I’ve found in Crown City with a single solid yellow center line, as you see sometimes in Japan for no-passing zones or you commonly see in Canada and Mexico for instance.\u00a0 So it’s a no passing area in a hilly part of town, right?\u00a0 Sure… except for the dashed yellow part marking a passing zone.\u00a0 Uh.\u00a0 I don’t think Japan ever uses dashed yellow passing zones so far as I know. \u00a0 And maybe even weirder, there is a loop of double yellow center line and white outside line two-lane road just outside DK Pass’s skiing mountain.\u00a0 How strange, huh?\u00a0 But that’s it, everything else I have found so far with asphalt-paved roads has white on two lane roads.<\/p>\n

However, four-lane highways in MKR usually have… all yellow lines, with double yellow lines in the center and yellow outside lines on the edges of the road.\u00a0 There are white dashed lines in between each lane in each direction, as well.\u00a0 A few four-lane areas have all-white lines, most notably the whole of the massively long Crown City Bridge, and the four lane road in Crown City leading to the rooftop track has double yellow center lines and white outside lines, fascinatingly enough, but those are the exceptions.<\/p>\n

In the rest of MKW, the four-lane-road standard is for roads to have yellow center and outside lines.\u00a0 Additionally, in the game, whenever yellow outside lines are used, there is a white checkerboard pattern outside of that yellow outside line, along the edge of the road.\u00a0 It’s a fun little graphical detail that I don’t think is used in the real world, at least not regularly.\u00a0 Japanese highways, as with their smaller roads, sometimes have white and sometimes have yellow in the center, but always have white outside lines, with, as I said, yellow used for center lines in areas where you should not pass.<\/p>\n

Comparing this to the real world, the usage of yellow center lines in the game is similar to how it is used in Japan.\u00a0 Those aforementioned few areas in MKW that have a single yellow line on curvy, hilly Crown City roads are good examples of how Japan would use a single yellow center line.\u00a0 In contrast, roads in the United States always use double yellow in the center, and white on the outside.\u00a0 Canada uses single or double yellow in the center. Dashed yellow is used in the US and Canada for passing areas, but looking it up in Japan it is a bit more complex, with gradations from dashed white to double yellow.\u00a0 For center lines MKW clearly was inspired by Japan’s road lines. It’s amusing to contrast this to the right-hand-drive nature of the roads.\u00a0 Remember, Japan drives on the left, not the right like MKW does.<\/p>\n

Those outside lines deserve attention, as they are a rare configuration indeed! In fact, while in the real world many nations use yellow center lines with white outside lines, many use all-white lines, and many use yellow outside lines with white center lines, NO country uses all-yellow lines as their standard road line color scheme.\u00a0 It is a layout seen in a few countries, but only in specialty applications such as national parks in Chile, a few specific roads in India, or such.\u00a0 That is to say, all-yellow is a thing used in certain countries, but never just for all of their regular highways, only to mark special areas.\u00a0 And yet, while they went with the very common two-lane road all white color configuration, Nintendo decided to go with the quite uncommon all yellow configuration for most four lane roads. I wonder why they did this?\u00a0 It’s pretty interesting.<\/p>\n

I should say, though, that large areas of the game do not use asphalt roads.\u00a0 I previously mentioned that road surfaces change depending on where you are. Some of this changes rapidly, but for some wider-area trends, in the desert, savannah, or jungle, the roads are dirt or sand.\u00a0 Around the south-center east, from the Venice-like town to Peach Beach, the roads are made of stone pavers.\u00a0 In the light-colored roads paved like this dark pavers are used in the center as a center line.\u00a0 Some other areas have stone roads like this also, such as blue stone or ice roads going to the ice palace in the northeast.\u00a0 These areas, and others, do not have any roads paved with tarmac, only snow, dirt, pavers, etc.\u00a0 The paved roads in the southeast stop at the edge of ‘Venice’, for instance.\u00a0 Mario Kart World is a mixture of road surfaces and roads existing at all.\u00a0 Wouldn’t it be so much fun if randomly you go over a little hill in the road and you’re driving through a river?\u00a0\u00a0 There is no bridge, just ford it.\u00a0 That would go so well in the real world… heh.<\/p>\n

Guardrails, Poles, and Signage<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

As for other forms of road markers, the standard guardrails used look like standard Japanese-style ones except with hexagonal posts instead of Japan’s round ones.\u00a0 Standard guardrails in the US are similar looking, but there are a few subtle differences, most notably that American guardrail posts are usually I-shaped and are attached to the rail by one bolt. Japanese guardrails have two bolts per post with a round post.\u00a0 MKW has two bolts per post and hexagonal posts.\u00a0 Perhaps they aren’t round in order to save polygons, but regardless they definitely aren’t I-shaped, so they largely went with Japanese guardrails here.\u00a0 As a note, European guardrails mostly look different from the styles seen in the US and Japan, though some are somewhat similar.\u00a0 Oh, some areas of the game have other kinds of guardrails, such as wooden fences in pastoral areas such as Moo Moo Farm and a split metal one in a few places, but this is realistic; many countries in the real world have different guardrails in certain areas.<\/p>\n

Electricity poles are rare in MKW. I guess that most power lines are buried?\u00a0 Long-distance buried power lines are quite rare in the US, but some countries particularly in Europe use them and some areas in America have them as well.\u00a0 There is certainly electricity here so the power is distributed somehow in the large majority of the game that doesn’t have lines.\u00a0 The areas that do have them have wooden poles, American-style, except with Japanese-style vertical metal pole plates strapped onto them.\u00a0 Some parts of the US may have things attached to the poles, but we don’t have standard strapped-on plates like Japan and MKW do.\u00a0 This is a pretty interesting design because Japan uses metal poles, but despite deciding to go for a more American power pole by having them be made of wood, they put Japanese pole plates on them, something we don’t have in that design. Neat stuff.<\/p>\n

Lampposts along the roads exist in some parts of the world, varying from biome to biome and themed for that area.\u00a0 You could use them to identify regions, but given that each region has a unique environment this would never be necessary. It would be interesting to know what the real-world inspirations for each lamppost style are, though; I do not have lampposts memorized, I’m not at that level at GeoGuessr.<\/p>\n

Continuing on, there are no speed limit signs in the game… kind of.\u00a0 There are a few ‘Speed Limit Infinite’ signs, including one in Crown City and one near DK Mountain along with others scattered around.\u00a0 They are kind of neat to see.\u00a0 They are green like all road signs in the game.\u00a0 However, I’ve got a significant criticism here: the road signs in MKW never actually give you any useful information.\u00a0 They just say Speed Level Infinite, or Mario Kart, or maybe Course Ahead, that’s it.\u00a0 There are no signs telling you which way to go to get to any location.\u00a0 Course Ahead… okay.\u00a0 Which one?\u00a0 It doesn’t say.\u00a0 There are also no road signs telling you the name of the streets at intersections or, most of the time, which way to go to get to the location you are going to.<\/p>\n

As a result of this, if you want to get from point to point by driving there instead of using the map to warp there it can be a frustratingly annoying task.\u00a0 You basically try to look at the very faint road lines on the overworld map and attempt to pick the right direction.\u00a0 Good luck, you’ll need it!\u00a0 Finding my way ot of some tracks to the main roads also can be tricky.\u00a0 There’s always a road connecting each course to the road network, but if you warp to a track finding it isn’t always easy and again, there are no signs helping you figure out which way to go.\u00a0 The minimap is next to useless too, all it does in Free Roam is show you a slightly zoomed out view of the same thing you’re seeing on the screen.\u00a0 It’sn early useless.\u00a0 Ugh.\u00a0 In races the map is great, why can’t you get an actual useful route map in Free Roam?\u00a0 It’s incredibly obnoxious that there isn’t one!<\/p>\n

Now, I said “most of the time” because a few locations do have a sign at the nearest major intersection telling you what is down that road.\u00a0 Boo Cinema has a large sign telling you that their theater is that way, for example.\u00a0 Other things like the two Mario raceways are right on the road so you can’t miss them.\u00a0 But most other locations are found off some random unmarked road at some random intersection.\u00a0 You need to know where they are to find them.\u00a0 Other locations such as the train stations aren’t shown on the minimap, either.\u00a0 If you want to find them learn the locations.<\/p>\n

Continuing on other subjects, occasionally random messages on the games’ main menu tell you how far you have driven in the game, in kilometers.\u00a0 Despite the US being the clear secondary influence on this games’ road design after Japan, there is no miles option, annoyingly.\u00a0 I have little idea of how long a kilometer is (about a thousand yards?).\u00a0 Also given that you aren’t told the distances in-game, since there is no speedometer, it’s not like there is any context for how far you have driven, anyway.<\/p>\n

Similarly, there are stoplights in MKW, in Crown City in particular, but they are always green for go, they don’t actually work.\u00a0 Cars will usually stop if there is an obstruction in front of them and will eventually stop to let in turning traffic so it works, but it is kind of amusing.\u00a0 The Crown City stoplights are vertical yellow ones.\u00a0 In Japan stoplights sometimes use blue for go instead of green, but in MKW they went with the standard basically everywhere else by using green… unless it’s actually a slightly bluish green as you also often see in Japan? Regardless, unlike Japan I haven’t seen any in MKW that are solid blue.<\/p>\n

Road signs telling you which way to go to get to places are green with white text. Japan uses green or blue road signs, depending on the type of place.\u00a0 They went with the American standard of green for the game and not blue like Japan, or yellow like some European countries use.\u00a0 Unlike in the real world, no distances are written on signs.\u00a0 This matches with the absence of speed limit signs and with the games’ on-screen display not having a speedometer telling you how fast you are going.\u00a0 Mario Kart games have never told you your speed, and this one is no exception.<\/p>\n

There are few warning signs in Mario Kart World, but railroad crossings do have them.\u00a0 The railroad warning sign is a small yellow diamond sign below a crossed-X railroad crossing marker, very similar to the one used in Japan.\u00a0 Japan uses many American-style yellow diamond warning signs, as opposed to the white with red border European style, and that is reflected in this game.\u00a0 As in most countries that aren’t the US there is no text on the crossed X part of the warning sign, it must be said, so it does not resemble a standard American railroad crossing.<\/p>\n

All signs in MKW are always in English, even in other language versions of the game. Similarly, store names in Crown City are in English in all versions.\u00a0 This made game development simpler for sure but makes you think that MKW is set in an English-speaking country, while not having the road line configuration of any English-speaking countries… not to mention that of the English-speaking world on the US and Canada have yellow center lines in common use, and neither of them would have white center lines on two lane roads.<\/p>\n

Vehicles, Buildings, and the World’s Map<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

And how about the vehicles on those roads? Other than the racers’ karts, in MKW you will see a lot of very small cars, each with a single Toad or Shyguy inside.\u00a0 These remind me of the small Kei cars common in Japan. Larger vehicles include tour buses, which look like a standard long-distance or tour bus, and various trucks with ramps on the back.\u00a0 There are also a few 18-wheelers with North American-style long nose cabs.\u00a0 These would be uncommon anywhere else. There are also police cars, and they are tiny, the same size as the regular vehicles.\u00a0 They have blue and white lights on top and run them at all times during their patrols, something done in Japan but not the West.\u00a0 I wonder if the designers knew that that was a Japan-specific thing?\u00a0 Perhaps not.\u00a0 It’s pretty neat that they actually drive routes, though they don’t pull anyone over no matter what chaos happens in this world.\u00a0 Civilian cars don’t just despawn if you follow them, they randomly go between several different locations then park somewhere.\u00a0 The drivers can even get out and walk around or go to a despawn point such as certain restaurants!\u00a0 See this Youtube video for more on this: https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=6vXdxJA_5sg<\/p>\n

Following that video, other Youtubers have tried to figure out how vehicle and train movement works.\u00a0 It’s pretty interesting stuff, though not related to this.\u00a0 Of the train layout videos this is probably the most comprehensive one: https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ehWmWcIeb70\u00a0 The train track layout in MKW works bi-directionally and unlike cars and people on foot, who are stuck to wander around specific areas in this game, trains cover the whole map from end to end.\u00a0 It is all timed so they never hit eachother.\u00a0 All of the trains are coal-burning trains of a 19th century style.\u00a0 There are some more modern trains in the one rail yard, but they don’t move, only the steam trains do.\u00a0 Heh.<\/p>\n

Returning to cars though, in GeoGuessr, one very useful thing for identifying cars is their license plates.\u00a0 However, there are no license plates in Mario Kart World!\u00a0 Given the lack of laws this place seems to have that may not be surprising, but it is a little weird when you realize that no vehicle has an identification plate.\u00a0 It makes sense that the karts don’t have them since they are race cars, but the regular cars probably should, you would think.\u00a0 Ah well.\u00a0 A few do have a special marker where the plate would go — the bomb cars have an exclamation point on a small yellow plate, for example — but regular cars have nothing. Some have a space where one would go, but it’s empty.<\/p>\n

Again assuming a north is up map, one interesting feature of the map is that much like most of the real world, the west side of the continent is wetter than the east side. In our world, look at the continents.\u00a0 Europe excepted there are a lot of east deserts and west green areas.\u00a0 This flips in places such as southern South America but still rain and win patterns mostly line up with this.\u00a0 The MKW world is a lowercase n-shaped continent.\u00a0 The west side of the MKW map has a desert and badlands in the south and center, and lava field in the northwest. The center is a grassland.\u00a0 The northeast is a forest.\u00a0 The center east is the snowy area.\u00a0 Again, why isn’t this in the north? Weird. Anyway, then the southeast has the jungle and savannah. So yeah, much wetter in the eastern part.<\/p>\n

I must say, though, there is one really weird thing about the map: the bridge.\u00a0 See, connecting the two lower peninsulas of that ‘n’ is a huge bridge.\u00a0 It’s a really cool set-piece and looks impressive.\u00a0 However,\u00a0 it doesn’t go anywhere almost anyone would want to visit!\u00a0 In no real world would such a structure be built.\u00a0 Imagine, building somethiing like the bridge from Hong Kong to Macau or the Chesapeke Bay Bridge or the San Francisco Bay Bridge, connecting your major city to… uh, to a nearly unpopulated savannah, near empty, uninhabited jungles.\u00a0 There are people living on the eastern half of the map, but they mostly live in the center to north-center, and that bridge may not be the fasterst way to get there from Crown City — going north from there to Peach Stadium then east would probably be a similar length trip.\u00a0 Obviously, the bridge exists because this is a videogame, but it never would in the real world because nobody would build a bridge to nowhere that’s THIS obviously going nowhere many people go.\u00a0 And that is why most civilian traffic on the bridge gets to the other side and turns around in the toll plaza on the savannah side of the bridge.\u00a0 Where would they go, anyway?\u00a0 Nobody lives anywhere near there.\u00a0 The few people going on safaris or visiting the dinosaur theme park in the jungle to the south would probably go regardless of if there was a massive bridge to get over there or not.<\/p>\n

The buildings in the world are themed, with each region having buildings fitting with its location.\u00a0 The MKW world is, in typical videogame fashion, compressed, with different biomes squashed right next to eachother in a highly unrealistic fashion because that’s more fun for the player.\u00a0 In the real world you could not have environments like that and it’s odd that the snowy area is in the northern east and not the far north, but as a condensed version of a fictional continent it’s perfectly reasonable.<\/p>\n

Also, if we assume that north is up on the map, that the warm-weather areas are in the south of the continent strongly suggests that Mario Kart World is in the northern hemisphere of its planet.\u00a0 If it was in the southern hemisphere, the more tropical areas would be north, not south, after all.<\/p>\n

On one last map-related note, despite having a day-night cycle, as in most videogames there are no tides in Mario Kart World.\u00a0 There’s a moon, but no tides.\u00a0 The water physics in this game are outstanding, so that’s kind of too bad.\u00a0 There probably should be tides, particularly in more northern areas of the continent — recall that tides are smaller the closer to the equator you go, larger the closer to the poles you go.<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

So yeah, Mario Kart World isn’t set in the real world!\u00a0 Imagine that, I thought it was… heh.\u00a0 But looking at Nintendo’s design here is interesting.\u00a0 For the most part, Mario Kart World’s roads and infrastructure are a mixture of Japanese and American influences, with Japan’s pole plates, guardrails, road center line colors, small cars, and more, along with American-style power poles, driving direction, English language signage, and road sign color and style.\u00a0 In contrast, European, African, or other Asian road styles do not seem to have had any influence on MKW’s design, I can’t think of any elements that most look like European-style signage.\u00a0 Some areas have architectural influences from some of those areas, such as the Venice-styled town and the Arabian desert area, but the road signage isn’t.<\/p>\n

We can also say that Mario Kart World’s continent is probably in the northern hemisphere of its world presuming that its planet is oriented the same way as Earth is due to all tropical areas being in the bottom of the map and thus likely in the south if the game follows the standard North = up convention, as maps usually do.<\/p>\n

Overall, Nintendo’s design decisions with Mario Kart World make sense.\u00a0 Nintendo wants to amke games with strong worldwide appeal, and I think that everything they did in the road and building design in MKW achieves that.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Where is Mario Kart World? I enjoy GeoGuessr.\u00a0 For anyone who has not heard of it, it is a geography game that uses Google Street View images to ask you, where in the world are you?\u00a0 Or rather, where in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[124,6,572],"tags":[574,45,573],"class_list":["post-1679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-modern-games","category-nintendo-switch-2","tag-mario-kart-world","tag-nintendo","tag-nintendo-switch-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1679"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1679\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}