Beautiful Mario Kart mod makes the Nintendo 64 game look like the box art

Mario Kart 64 isn’t the origin of the long-running racing series, but it is a beloved entry. With all the throwback tracks coming in the Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Booster Pack, the Nintendo 64 version is on the minds of many players. If you want to revisit the original Choco Mountain or Kalamari Desert, you can now do so with a very special mod.

Take a look at the Mario Kart 64 box art above. In reality, the game doesn’t look like that — even if you’re playing it on modern hardware via the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack. A group of modders under the direction of AndratVA wanted to change that and make the game look just like what’s promised on the box. The result is the Mario Kart HD Project, and you can download the final result from GitHub.

If you want to preview it first, you can check out YouTuber Nerrel’s video that explains the mod and explores how it looks in practice. As Nerrel points out, Mario Kart 64 uses sprites rather than models, because the hardware at the time couldn’t handle models of all eight racers at once. The Mario Kart HD mod changes that, resulting in a radically different look for Mario, Luigi, and all the other playable characters. It’s more than just souped-up character models though: high-def textures on the courses and slick-looking menu text have been added as well.

As for current-day Mario Kart, 8 Deluxe continues to be the best-selling Switch game ever — it passed 45 million units sold as of May 2022. All those players now have even more tracks to choose from thanks to the aforementioned Booster Pack. The second wave arrived in early August, bringing eight more courses to the game and tweaking Coconut Mall after fans complained about a missing hazard. We have a good idea of what the remaining Booster Pack courses will be as well, thanks to some leaked music files.