 Good evening. Today I'm going to be talking about the colorful map known only as Mario Kart. It's one of the most popular unofficial Team Fortress 2 levels ever made, and if you frequently browse community servers, you've almost certainly run into some variant of it. For this video, I'm only going to be talking about the original, which was released on January 18th, 2008 by a mapper who you might also know as the brain behind CTF Vikings and Cyberpunk. They've since moved on from source mapping to game development, with their first RPG game Phantasmata out in early access on Steam. If you're interested, you can support their ongoing and future endeavors through their Patreon, which is linked in the video description. Anyways, let's have a look at this relic of a map. As you might expect from its title, the main battleground of this map is a large race course inspired by the Super Mario Kart stage Mario Circuit 1. Due to its huge skybox and accessible rooftops, this map became very popular on servers that make use of low gravity and or grappling hook gimmicks. And of course, these ridiculous sightlines are also very alluring to snipers and wrangler engineers. As you might have guessed, this map's balancing isn't the reason people hold it in high regard. Let's have a look at the spawns. Usually, each team will spawn on their respective base, located on opposite corners of the course. Their one room structure is caved into some kind of Mario block, and their exit doors lack any type of cover. With the aforementioned sightlines, you can imagine it's pretty easy to get spawn camped. However, every once in a while, there's a chance you might spawn outside the building, which the creator confirmed to me was an effort to lessen the efficiency of sticky trapping. There's also two mobile spawn points in this map called Cat Buses, one for each team. They're a reference to the movie My Neighbor Totoro, and they circle the main race course alongside a couple of other colorful vehicles. There's two standard race carts, a tank, and the notorious 4chan party van. Go ahead, climb in. On top of those vehicles that circle the racing course, there's also a couple you can find in other areas of the map. Just outside the red spawn, there's a duck car that drives in circles over and over again. And there's a red motorcycle with skirts around the edge of the course and does cool stunt jumps. All of these vehicles used to be controllable with the same system as the carts from Half-Life 1, but they no longer function because the map entity that powers them is broken in modern versions of CF2. Nowadays, if you boot up the map, none of them work except the Cat Buses, since they move on their own. What a shame. At the center of the race course is this large two-story structure made out of rainbow blocks. There's two paths cutting through the center of the building, one of which leads to the upstairs club. This club has a dance floor, and a music selection system that lets you cycle through a total of five tracks. The first two are directly from Super Mario Kart, those being the Battle Mode and Mario Circuit themes. The third is a hard bass remix of the Mario Circuit theme. The fourth is the Mute City theme from F-Zero as it appeared in Super Smash Bros. Melee. And the fifth and final track is the 1991 song Jesus Built My Hot Rod by the industrial metal band Ministry. Weird stuff. But now that we have all of the locations on the map established, it's time to talk about what makes it special. I'll start with the little things. Physics props, like cones and explosive barrels, are littered around this map. In the club room, there's even a companion cube from Portal, and a set of speakers that you can knock around. Nowadays, most mappers avoid putting physics props in TF2 maps because they're kind of buggy, so I always find it kind of interesting when a map has them. It shows its age. There's also, by the duck car, a magic pipe that teleports you to the other corner of the map if you jump in it. Almost every edit of the map I've seen makes these thwomps into entities that crush you, so I was surprised to see that in the original there were actually nothing more than map geometry. Regardless, teleport triggers on TF2 maps are also something you usually don't see outside of event maps or maybe trade maps, so I figured it was worth noting. But of all the things about Mario Kart that make it distinctive of its era, none compared to the sheer amount of cultural references packed into it. We'll start with the video game references. As I mentioned at the start, the map's landscape is inspired by the Mario Kart series, and you'll spot plenty of other references to the Mario franchise as well. There's this image from the infamous CDI game Hotel Mario, Alakatu, the thwomps and magic pipes from just a moment ago, the giant mushrooms, and even these exclamation point blocks straight out of Super Mario World that spawn health and ammo pickups when you destroy them. But Mario is really only the beginning of this map's video game roll call. Scattered all around are tons of references to games that are otherwise completely unrelated to the Mario Kart series. For starters, there's the hack and slash game No More Heroes, which for some reason appears in this map in several different places. There's images of Slowpoke and Mudkip, Pokémon that used to be big inside jokes on the internet, and a TF2 themed parody advertisement for Phoenix Wright. Don't call that number. Other games that make appearances include Jet Set Radio, System Shock, Metal Gear Solid, Portal, and Animal Crossing. Some viewers will be keen to note that this picture actually originates from Animal Crossing's anime spinoff, and that brings me to my next segment. On top of video games, this map also contains a good share of anime and manga references, which I had to get outside help to identify because I'm far from well versed in that realm. First, there's this dance sequence from Lucky Star, which is broadcasted on a giant billboard to the right of red spawn. To the left of that, there's a picture of the character retro from the Dead Leaves series. There's two references to Yotsuba, and even the ancient Gashunk meme makes an appearance. Speaking of, being a map from 2008, Mario Kart is rooted with ancient late 2000s online inside jokes. There's the classic Know You, which alone takes me back a good bit. Gentleman, a TF2 meme that I didn't realize was old enough to appear in this map. A Crit Rocket meme that shows what I believe to be a riff of the awesome face. There's arrangement of billboards showing the Xbox 360 kid retraced to resemble each of the nine mercenaries. The reaction guy's meme appears by the bleachers near red spawn, redrawn to start the cast of the Half-Life series. And then there's the Ittort face, which appears all over the walls, floors, and ceiling of this Easter egg room, which showcases pornography based on the Portal series. Classy, I know. The creator of Mario Kart is asked to clarify to all viewers these three things. One, the map is created for a community server whose members are responsible for submitting the images seen in it. Two, the not-safe-work Portal art was added to the map as an anti-theft deterrent, but a clean version was later distributed to FPS Banana. They do not endorse the map, the server, or any material in the map, so please do not contact them regarding the map or anything in it. ["Balloon Race"] Much like Balloon Race, another one of my favorite TF2 maps, Mario Kart really helped push the envelope for how weird TF2 maps can get. Jam-packed with wacky, custom textures, its vibrant style provided an alluring escape from the default rotation of gray and brown TF2 maps. And just like CP Orange before it, Mario Kart gave birth to a whole genre of hyper-casual TF2 servers, with its steady flow of spin-offs featuring new secrets and areas helping to cement it as a popular and consistent alternative way to enjoy the game. Of course, I can't talk about this map's legacy without mentioning the late Colin Wykoff, whose tragic death from leukemia in 2015 sent shockwaves throughout the greater-source community. Best known for his channel, Kitty0706, that put smiles on hundreds of thousands of faces, Colin's iconic Garry's Mod Machinima Team Fabulous 2 is one of the first things people think of when they see this map. Last year, an edit called Mario Kart Reanimated was created in memory of him, filled with references to him and his legacy, and I think it's kind of touching. I refuse to end this video on a sad note, though. Colin's work lives on through what he left behind, and his videos still bring joy to people to this day. And similarly, Mario Kart, as one of the earliest community maps ever made for TF2, will live on as an unforgettable part of the TF2 community's history. You can still find servers hosting it today, and I doubt that'll ever change. As new generations find interest in TF2, they'll create memories on weird maps and community servers just like older generations did. And I have no doubt that Mario Kart will retain its status as a staple of weird-ass TF2 maps, a timeless map for a timeless game. Thanks for watching. Have a good day.