Mario Kart’s blue shell (officially 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 Mario Kart series since 64, the Blue Shell is a player-first laser-guided missile. This is almost inevitable and completely unavoidable in older games. Every Mario Kart player knows the sense of dread—and childish injustice—that accompanies the sudden, piercing wail of the Blue Shell’s siren, announcing an unceremonious end to your enjoyable race lead. But a research project at Queen’s University Belfast has asked a fascinating question about Blue Shell: does it even work?
Of course, Blue Shell works in a literal sense – blowing up hopes and dreams in the first place with depressing accuracy. 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 a major part of the game?
Blue Shell’s fame may mask its unusual status in gaming: it’s surprisingly rare for items in competitive multiplayer to specifically target the leader, let alone incapacitate him for a few seconds. “Isn’t it […] a little unfair?” Kotaku skeptically asked Hideki Konno, “the man behind Mario Kart,” back in 2011. One answer would be that it doesn’t have to be fair: “unfair” game mechanics are very important to how many games function overly difficult bosses, unpredictable traps, and harsh punishments can help build a world, give the game a sense of risk and difficulty, and shape player responsiveness.
But that’s not the answer Kono gave. Instead, Konno stated that the Blue Shell was invented to try to increase the competitiveness and fairness of the races: “We wanted to create a race where everyone would participate until the end.” Various defenses of the Blue Shell are based on the same idea : that the Blue Jacket is “obviously” a mechanism to preserve competitiveness. “Most obviously it’s the Great Equalizer, a towering blue embodiment of pure carnage that gives players at the back of the pack a fighting chance,” claimed Nathan Grayson in 2014, citing a video from popular YouTuber Extra History: “One of the reasons for the blue Shell’s existence is apparently meant to serve as a catch-up mechanism […] The blue shell helps ensure that no one is completely left in the dust with no chance of return.”
But is this true? Does Blue Shell help keep racing competitive? Alex McMillan, then a MSc in Computer Science at QUB, set out to test this piece of folk wisdom in gaming. They created a metric called “race proximity” to measure how close Mario Kart races are: essentially, it’s averaging the distance between each consecutive pair of cars – first and second, second and third, and so on. – so it measures how close the race is overall, not just the race between first and second. (After all, beating Pink Yoshi to fifth place in a duff race could be what wins the tournament for you, and Blue Shell is specifically designed to help those behind.)
Then they tested it. 50 test participants completed three races each in Mario Kart 64, all at Luigi’s Raceway (to avoid environmental risks affecting the results). One race had the regular probability of getting a blue shell; one makes you three times more likely than usual to get a Blue Shell, as long as you’ve been far enough behind to qualify for one; and one removed the blue shell entirely.
The result? Blue shells don’t significantly affect how close Mario Kart races are. They might make the race leader swear loudly enough to scare the cat away, but unlike, say, Golden Mushrooms or Bullet Bills, the player who gets a Blue Shell won’t be greatly helped by getting one. So, it’s pretty official: Blue Shell is not a fairness or competitiveness 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 the developers experimented with removing the Blue Shell, they came to the conclusion that “there was something that wasn’t enough in the game.” So, although the mechanical function of the Blue Shell is surprisingly small in the course of the competition, it has an important psychological function for the players. What could this be?
In his conclusion, McMillan speculates that Blue Shell is for players whose purpose has changed: they are so far off the pace that they no longer expect victory and may feel disengaged from the race. The blue shell gives distant players the “illusion of freedom of action,” allowing them to “still feel like they’re influencing the race.” The blue shell allows the group of players to experience the sense of excitement and gloating 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 frustration, Blue Shell allows backmarkers to vent their frustrations on the race leader, and this can help a group – or even a solo player – release some pent-up tension and feel more positive about the game.
Yabuki himself alludes to this: “Something that I personally really think is the human emotional element of the gaming experience,” he says, “[and] if you have something that feels unfair or makes you angry… Everyone is different in this regard. What you’re going to feel is unfair might be different to someone else.” Yabuki describes wanting to balance the emotions of the experience so that even if a player feels disappointed on a given day, they’ll still come back to Mario Kart the next week. Then the Blue Wrap can help spread the frustration to a wider group instead of keeping it concentrated on certain players.
Items that prioritize speed, especially at the expense of other players, tend to be most useful in helping lagging racers catch up: “Lightning actually does what players want from Blue Wrap because it slows everyone down but you,” he notes McMillan So, if you really want to challenge the victory, prioritize the speed elements. a way for less experienced or less fortunate players to relax without putting a damper on the mood, and it can work as a reminder to tournament leaders to pay attention to their friends, even if it means giving 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.