Mario Kart World adds 10 SNES courses and new Knockout routes

Nintendo released Version 1.8.0 for Mario Kart World yesterday, adding 10 retro tracks and two new Knockout Tour routes to the Switch 2 racing game. The patch is free. It pulls layouts directly from the 1992 Super Nintendo original, making variations of Mario Circuit, Ghost Valley, Choco Island, Koopa Beach, and Vanilla Lake playable in standard VS Race, Time Trials, and online modes.

According to the official update notes, the SNES courses bring back a specific mechanical quirk. Instead of the floating item boxes the series adopted in 1996, these tracks use classic flat item panels painted directly onto the ground.

Flat panels and lap times

The flat panels change the spacing and timing of item grabs, forcing players to drive over specific tiles rather than clipping the edge of a floating cube. I am curious to see how that 16-bit design choice translates to the open-world physics engine. Hitting a flat panel at 150cc in a modern drift feels very different than it did on a Mode 7 flat plane.

The original 1992 game established the core franchise conventions, introducing the banana peels and red shells that ruin friendships today. Bringing those exact track layouts into a fully 3D open world is a strange collision of eras. The original Ghost Valley was entirely flat, relying on missing guardrails to create tension. Recreating that hazard with modern suspension physics should be chaotic.

The update also fills a few feature gaps. Time Trials finally have proper lap time tracking, and Nintendo added an online Spectator Mode. It's a solid quality-of-life pass for a game that launched with a massive scope but a few missing standard features.

Surviving the Turnip Rally

The other half of the patch expands the Knockout Tour mode. This is the large-scale elimination format where dozens of racers compete across successive checkpoints, with the bottom four players dropping out at each stage. Version 1.8.0 introduces the Propeller Rally and the Turnip Rally routes.

Knockout Tour has been the defining multiplayer addition to Mario Kart World since the game launched in 2025. Moving the franchise into an open-world structure was a massive shift after Mario Kart 8 Deluxe sold 60 million copies on a traditional closed-circuit model. The Switch 2 sequel relies on these sprawling, interconnected routes to justify the open map. Adding more paths keeps the elimination mode from getting stale.

We've all been there, staring at the back of the pack in a Knockout Tour, wondering where it all went wrong. The Turnip Rally route looks particularly punishing, weaving through some of the tighter agricultural zones on the map.

Nintendo is clearly applying the same post-launch strategy here that worked for the Booster Course Pass on the previous console. Integrating classic 2D layouts into an open-world architecture requires a bit more structural work than simply porting them, but the result gives the map some much-needed historical flavor.