SuperKarts

Year 1995, afternoon, and I'm staring at the monitor instead of being outside. On a track full of rivals, little racing karts zip around, and I'm frantically jabbing the arrow keys because someone just threw a money bag right in front of me and I missed it. This was SuperKarts from Manic Media Production.

It's a top-down racing arcade where you're not just competing for first place—you're also collecting cash scattered across the track. Money drops from opponents, lies on the road, and you earn it for good race results too. The more you grab, the better. Exactly the kind of mechanic that forces you to chase down the last-place racer instead of cruising comfortably at the front.

The game offers two modes. Arcade gives you lives and focuses squarely on money collecting—realism takes a backseat, the emphasis is on movement and on-track chaos. The controls feel exactly how similar games from that era had to feel: simple, without grand ambitions to simulate tire physics. The kart behaves more like a toy than a machine, but that's fine, because nobody was running this game for precise telemetry. The graphics were acceptable for 1995, VGA colors did their job, and Sound Blaster made sure you knew where your rival was even if you couldn't see them.

SuperKarts never stuck in memory as a genre milestone. It wasn't Screamer or Super Cars II. It was a solid, unremarkable afternoon at the computer—a game that didn't demand a manual or patience, just a bit of coordination and the urge to clip that turn tight before your opponent. It's aged predictably today: the AI is transparent, content is modest, and at first glance you can tell development happened in a small studio with a tight budget. Not a criticism, just context.

Today you'll appreciate it if you've got twenty minutes and a taste for something straightforward with no installation. It runs flawlessly in your browser via DOSBox, and that money-collecting system still sets it apart from the average racing game of the era. It's not a discovery, but it's not a waste of time either. Sometimes it's enough to run a few laps and remember that not every game needed to be an epic.