Mario Kart’s blue shell (officially, the Spiny Shell) is one of the most iconic items in video game history. It is also one of the most controversial. A mainstay of the series since Mario Kart 64, the Blue Shell is a laser-guided missile that targets the player first. It’s almost inevitable and completely unavoidable in older games. Every Mario Kart player knows the sense of dread—and childish injustice—that accompanies the Blue Shell’s sudden high-pitched siren wail, announcing an unceremonious end to your luscious race lead. But a research project at Queen’s University Belfast has asked an interesting question about the blue shell: does it work?
Of course, Blue Shell works in a literal sense – it blows away the hopes and dreams of the first place with depressing precision. The question is whether it does what it is designed to do and what people believe it does. And if not, then why is it such an essential part of the game?
Blue Shell’s fame may mask its unusual status in gaming: it’s surprisingly rare for items in competitive multiplayer games to specifically target the leader, let alone incapacitate them for a few seconds. “Isn’t she? […] a little unfair?” Kotaku skeptically asked Hideki Konno, ‘the man behind Mario Kart’, in 2011. Now, one answer would be that it doesn’t have to be fair: ‘unfair’ game mechanics are deeply important to how Many games work Incredibly difficult bosses, unpredictable traps, and harsh punishments can help build a world, give a game a sense of danger and difficulty, and shape player response.
But that’s not the answer Konno gave. Instead, Konno stated that the blue shell was invented in an effort to increase the competition and fairness of the races: “We wanted to create a race where everyone was in it until the end.” Various defenses of Blue Shell are based on the same idea: that Blue Shell is ‘clearly’ a mechanism to preserve competition. “Most obvious is the Great Equalizer – the rising blue embodiment of pure carnage that gives players at the back of the pack a fighting chance,” argued Nathan Grayson in 2014, citing a video by popular YouTuber Extra History: “One reason for the Blue Shell to exist is obviously to serve as a recovery mechanism […] The blue shell helps to ensure that no one is completely left in the dust with no way to return.”
But is this true? Does Blue Shell help keep racing competitive? Alex McMillan, then a MSc computer science student at QUB, set out to test this popular gaming wisdom. They created a metric called ‘competitive proximity’ to measure how close Mario Kart races are: basically, it’s an average of the distance between each consecutive pair of cars – first and second, second and third, and so on in a row – so it measures how close the race is as a whole, and not just the race between first and second. (Beating Pink Yoshi in fifth place in a duff race could be what ends the tournament for you, after all, and the Blue Shell is specifically meant to help those on the back.)
Then, they tested it. 50 test participants completed three races each in Mario Kart 64, all at Luigi’s Raceway (to avoid environmental hazards affecting results). A race had the regular odds of getting a blue shell; one made you three times more likely than usual to get a blue shell, as long as you were far enough behind to qualify for one; and one removed the blue shell entirely.
Outcome? Blue Shells do not significantly affect how close Mario Kart races are. They might make the race leader swear enough to spook the cat, but unlike, say, Golden Mushrooms or Bullet Bills, the player who gets a blue shell won’t be meaningfully helped by getting one. So it’s pretty official: Blue Shell isn’t a fairness or competition mechanic, and it doesn’t do what it was officially designed to do.
But Kosuke Yabuki, the director of Mario Kart 7 and 8, told Eurogamer in 2017 that when developers experimented with removing the Blue Shell, they came to the conclusion that “there’s something missing in the game”. So even though Blue Shell’s mechanical function is surprisingly small during a race, it has an important psychological function for players. What could this be?
In their conclusion, McMillan speculates that Blue Shell is for players whose purpose has changed: they are so far off the pace that they no longer anticipate winning and may feel disconnected from the race. Blue Shell gives far-flung defensive players an “illusion of agency,” allowing them to “still feel like they’re impacting the race.” The blue shell allows the player group to feel a sense of excitement and fear that accompanies the race leader’s panic, but it also specifically allows the player who cast it to feel noticed, influential, and dangerous. In a game with a lot of pent-up frustrations, Blue Shell allows players to take out their frustration on the race leader, and this can help the group – or even a solo player – release some built-up tension and feel more positive about it. Playing.
Yabuki himself hints at this: “Something that I personally really consider is the human emotion element of the game experience,” he says, “[and] if you have something that feels unfair or makes you angry… Everyone is different in this regard. What you’ll feel is unfair might be different with someone else.” Yabuki describes wanting to balance the emotions of the experience, so even if a certain player feels frustrated on a certain day, they’ll come back again. in Mario Kart next week. Then, The Blue Shell can help spread the frustration to a wider group, rather than keeping it focused on specific players.
Items that prioritize speed, especially at the expense of other players, are usually the most useful for helping back runners catch up: “Lightning actually does what players want Blue Shell to do, because it slows everyone down. except you,” notes McMillan. So if you really want to challenge for victory, prioritize speed items. But Mario Kart isn’t just a video game, it’s also most famously a social game, and Blue Shell’s accidental genius comes from this: Blue Shell can provide a way for less skilled or less fortunate players to exploit without dampening the mood, and can act as a reminder to race leaders to pay attention to their friends, too if it’s to give them the middle finger.
So the next time you send someone a Blue Shell, be sure to remind them that it’s in the spirit of friendship.