LEGO Mario Kart has fallen into step with the LEGO Super Mario digital figures, but one savvy builder’s Rainbow Road simulator shows there’s another route these sets could take for older fans.
Mario Kart is dominating the LEGO Super Mario section in LEGO Stores in 2025, debuting an entire wave of sets on January 1 that run the gamut from
That’s great for kids, who are absolutely the target audience for these initial LEGO Mario Kart sets, but what about older builders? Well, the LEGO Group is now rumoured to be debuting a scaled-up kart as part of its summer wave – but it very much sounds like that will fit into the same sort of static space as 10337 Lamborghini Countach 5000 Quattrovalvole, 10295 Porsche 911 and so on.
So while that will probably make for a neat display piece in line with those cars, it’s still not really what we’ve come to love the 18+ LEGO Super Mario sets for, which is their functionality. Think 71374 Nintendo Entertainment System’s side-scrolling TV set; 71411 The Mighty Bowser’s puppet-like articulation and throat cannon; and so on. But there is another way.
Redditorm Bbeethoven99 has cooked up a Rainbow Road driving simulator that takes the bones of the NES’s side-scrolling functionality and twists it into a racetrack, complete with Mario veering left and right across the course’s surface. They’ve shared the results over on reddit, complete with a video of the build in action – and it’s exactly the sort of thing we’d love to see from an official set.
The colourful course is topped off with a large-scale dashboard, complete with a steering wheel, dials and even a key in the ignition, which Bbeethoven99 seems to confirm does actually start the motor running. And true to most of our experiences with Rainbow Road, the builder says they have indeed accidentally sent Mario flying off the edge of the track, which was apparently ‘catastrophic’.
“I'll add the full destruction video if I have time, because Mario falling out can take the whole thing down,” they wrote in a comment on reddit. That video has yet to surface, but keep an eye on the Nintendo Switch and Mario Kart subreddits for updates. If you’re interested in what makes this whole thing tick, Bbeethoven99 says it combines a pair of Technic motors and a pair of angled motors for the conveyor belt mechanism, along with a system motor for Mario’s self-driving mode.
If you’re hoping to recreate something like this at home, prepare for it to get expensive – the tiles for the road alone apparently added up to over $120. But here’s hoping the LEGO Group has its own ingenious approach to Mario Kart up its sleeve for older fans anyway…
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