Mario Kart: Super Circuit is a 2001 kart racing game for the Game Boy Advance (GBA). It is the third Mario Kart game and retains its predecessors' gameplay: as a Mario franchise character, the player races opponents around tracks based on locales from the Super Mario platform games. Tracks contain obstacles and power-ups that respectively hamper and aid the player's progress. Super Circuit includes various single-player and multiplayer game modes, including a Grand Prix racing mode and a last man standing battle mode.
Super Circuit was developed by Intelligent Systems and published by Nintendo. It was the first handheld Mario Kart game and the only game in the series developed by Intelligent Systems. Its graphical style changed drastically from early demos, with the final release resembling Super Mario Kart (1992) visually. Nintendo revealed Super Circuit alongside the GBA in 2000 and released it in mid-2001, months after the console's launch.
Super Circuit received acclaim, with praise for its modes, presentation, gameplay, and difficulty, though responses to the multiplayer were mixed. Retrospectively, critics have ranked it as one of the best GBA games, but one of the lesser Mario Kart games due to its lack of technical innovation compared to its predecessors. It was nominated for several awards and won one. Super Circuit sold 5.91 million copies worldwide, making it the fourth-bestselling GBA game. It was rereleased digitally for the Virtual Console line on the Nintendo 3DS in 2011 and the Wii U in 2014, and for the Nintendo Classics service in 2023.
Gameplay
thumb|left|The player, as [[Yoshi, racing on Peach Circuit, the game's introductory track]]
Mario Kart: Super Circuit is a kart racing game featuring characters and elements from the Mario franchise. The player controls one of eight Mario characters and races opponents in karts around tracks themed around locales from the Super Mario platform games. and coins that increase their speed once collected. Achieving a high grade on any of the game's five original cups unlocks a single-player cup from Super Mario Kart (1992). Quick Run allows the player to race with customizable aspects, such as lap count and toggling item boxes and coins. It borrows elements from Super Mario Kart and Mario Kart 64 (1996), and uses a similar graphical style to Super Mario Kart, particularly with its use of parallax scrolling and Mode 7-style scaling. Originally titled Mario Kart Advance in English, Super Circuit was announced by Nintendo prior to its annual Space World exhibition in 2000 and was unveiled alongside the GBA console itself. Gameplay screenshots published in an issue of CoroCoro featured a different super deformed art style, depicting characters with large heads. Items from early versions were also absent in the final release. It released not long after the GBA itself, which launched in March in Japan and June elsewhere. It was the third entry in the Mario Kart series, after Super Mario Kart and Mario Kart 64, and the first released on a handheld console. Nintendo intended to release Super Circuit in mainland China through iQue, which localized Nintendo games for the region. A Chinese translation was created, but its release was canceled due to significant piracy of iQue's first batch of localized GBA games. The game was rereleased for the Nintendo 3DS and Wii U's digital Virtual Console. On the 3DS, it was released free on December 16, 2011 for members of the Ambassador Program, eligible for entry to anyone who accessed the 3DS's eShop service before the console received a price cut. It was made available for purchase on the Wii U in 2014 in North America and 2015 in Europe and Japan. Super Circuit was also rereleased on the Nintendo Switch as part of the Nintendo Classics service on February 8, 2023.