Clash Karts

From banana peels to grand pianos: why kart weapons are funny

Kart games are full of weapons, and almost none of them look like weapons. Banana peels, turtle shells, a cushion that makes a rude noise: the genre has borrowed its arsenal from a century of slapstick, and for good reasons.

Published 12 October 2026.

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The oil can that became a banana

The first Mario Kart nearly had a more serious arsenal. Hideki Konno, who directed Super Mario Kart (1992), told Nintendo's Satoru Iwata that in the early prototype, "instead of a banana peel as an item, there were little oil cans. If you threw one out, the oil would spill, sending the karts spinning."

An oil slick belongs to car chases. A banana peel belongs to cartoons, and the swap set the tone for the whole genre. The finished game handed its drivers banana peels, green and red shells, a feather, a mushroom, a star and a lightning bolt: hazards from a fairy tale and a comic strip, not a war film. Shigeru Miyamoto, its producer, said in the game's 1992 Japanese strategy guide (in a fan translation) that the goal was "a game where both players and onlookers would be laughing and smiling."

A century of slipping

The banana peel was a real menace before it was a joke. Atlas Obscura has traced how discarded peels littered the streets of late nineteenth-century New York: in 1884 the New York Times reported a 75-year-old merchant who slipped on one outside his home and broke his leg, and Theodore Roosevelt, as the city's police chief, lectured his officers on the peel's "tendency to toss people into the air." Once the streets were cleaned up, the slip lived on in vaudeville and film, where nobody really got hurt.

That is the rule slapstick runs on. Chuck Jones's often-quoted rules for his Road Runner cartoons, which began with Fast and Furry-ous in 1949, include "The Coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures," and "Whenever possible, make gravity the Coyote's greatest enemy." (Michael Maltese, who wrote the early cartoons, later said he had never heard of any such rules; they read like a description of what the team did rather than a plan.) Anvils and pianos fall, the victim staggers off, and nobody needs a funeral.

Pianos have a special place in the tradition. In The Music Box (1932), Laurel and Hardy spend the film hauling a piano up an enormous flight of steps and watching it roll back down, and it won the first Academy Award for a live-action comedy short. The whoopee cushion, meanwhile, came from a Toronto rubber firm, JEM Rubber Co., in 1930. One of America's big novelty makers, S.S. Adams, turned it down as "indelicate"; the Johnson Smith mail-order catalogue took it on in 1931 with the line "It gives forth noises that can be better imagined than described."

Why a race needs a banana

Comic weapons are not only there to be funny. They do a job a race needs done: they keep everybody in it. In the same 1992 interview, programmer Hajime Yajina explained that "the lower your rank, the better the items you get," and Konno that the items "give some hope when you've fallen behind, and allow for the thrill of an upset victory." Nintendo still says it about Mario Kart World (2025): "The lower your position, the more likely you'll receive items that could turn the tables."

The most famous of those table-turners is the Spiny Shell, the blue shell that hunts down whoever is in first place, which arrived with Mario Kart 64 (1996). Konno defended it to Kotaku in 2011: "We wanted to create a race where everyone was in it until the end." Kosuke Yabuki, who directed later games in the series, told Eurogamer in 2017 that the team had tried the game without it: "When we've experimented without the blue shell, actually it feels like something's missing." And then: "sometimes life isn't fair."

A homing shell is not good physics, and its makers knew it. Masato Kimura, Mario Kart 64's main programmer, said in that game's guidebook interview (again in fan translation) that the red and blue shells ignored the laws that the green ones obeyed, and that "good games are made from 'good lies'."

That is the real reason the weapons are silly. A turtle shell that chases you, a banana that spins you round, a bomb that walks: none of it pretends to be fair, or real, or painful. Losing to a rubber duck stings less than losing to a missile, and the player who got hit is laughing too, which brings them back for the next race.

Nine silly weapons for one beach

Clash Karts is a battle game rather than a race, so it borrows the tradition and changes one thing. There is no race position to make up, so every kart has the same chances from an item box, leading or last. What it keeps is the comedy:

The racers are in on the joke too: a baby, a grandad in driving goggles, a chef, an alligator who works as a sewer plumber, a lost alien and a bingo-champion nan, all on the same beach buggy. The items guide has every number behind each weapon, and the racers page introduces the six of them.

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