The game decides what you deserve
The ITEM you get from a box is not random. It depends on where you are in the RACE. Trail in last and the game hands you the powerful things — a triple MUSHROOM, a LIGHTNING bolt that shrinks everybody, or the blue SHELL that flies up the track and detonates on whoever is winning. Lead the race and you will mostly get a single BANANA and the vague hope nobody is closing in.
Designers call this rubber-banding, and it is the reason a family game stays interesting all the way to the FINISH. The strongest player cannot simply drive away from everyone, and the youngest at the table can win a race honestly, which no amount of skill-based design would allow.
Fake 3D on a machine that could not do 3D
The first Super Mario Kart came out in 1992 on a console with no ability to draw a three-dimensional world at all. The trick it used was a graphics mode that could take one flat image and rotate, stretch and squash it line by line as the screen was drawn.
Tilt that flat picture away from the viewer and it looks exactly like a road running to the horizon. Everything else — the karts, the trees, the BANANA skins — was a flat sprite scaled up as it got closer. The whole COURSE was a rug being wobbled convincingly, and it fooled an entire generation.
Drifting is the actual skill
Underneath the chaos there is a technique that separates good players from lucky ones. Hold the DRIFT round a corner and the kart builds charge; release at the right moment and you get a TURBO BOOST out of the bend. Chain those together lap after LAP and the difference over a GRAND PRIX is enormous.
Collecting COINS raises your top SPEED, taking a hit loses them, and the racing line matters as much as in any serious driving game. Good players are not hoping for a lucky box; they are making sure they never need one.
There is even a defence against the blue SHELL, which is supposed to be undodgeable. Save a MUSHROOM, wait for the shell to begin its dive, and a perfectly timed BOOST can carry you out from under the explosion. Getting it right is rare enough that people film it.
The best-selling racing game there has been
Mario Kart 8 and its updated Switch version have sold more than sixty million copies, making it the best-selling racing game in history and one of the best-selling games of any kind. It stays in the charts year after year rather than selling in one burst, largely because it is the game people buy when they buy the console.
It is not really about the karts. It is that four people of wildly different ability can sit on one sofa, and every one of them believes they might win — right up to the moment a blue SHELL arrives over the FINISH line and settles the argument.