There’s a whole world of shockingly creative YouTube channels out there, but it’s not often we come across something as surprising as Atlas Arcade’s playable Mario Kart video.
Mind you, it’s not actually Mario Kart with mechanics, items, and all that. Instead, you’re just going from left to right with a racer of your choice – you can switch between different ones by changing the video’s subtitles – for less than one minute on the famous Rainbow Road, but as purely a concept for more complex experiments that may or may not happen, it’s impressive.
Atlas Arcade has seemingly been working on similar interactive videos for a few months now, ranging from Flappy Bird to Five Nights at Freddy’s adaptations. They’re all excellent exercises in ingenuity, and with 37.5k subscribers and hundreds of thousands of views on many of these videos, it’s clear there’s an audience for such creative endeavours.
The team’s take on Mario Kart – like many of Atlas Arcade’s videos – was made possible by YouTube’s 360-degree spherical video function, which lets users upload and move around a ‘camera’ inside videos that expand beyond the usual borders and even loop around. It’s been available for a long time, but this is the first time I’ve personally seen it used to make a game “playable” in tandem with keyboard shortcuts and custom subs. “The code for this game was written in HTML and JavaScript with additional assets and animations rendered using Python with the help of the Manim library,” the official description added.
The custom subs are perhaps the most amazing bit of the whole thing, with different languages offering the opportunity to select different ‘characters’ even if the video plays out the same. That element was handled by Animated Subtitles, a channel entirely dedicated to porting sprites and animations to YouTube’s subtitle system which is equally impressive on its own.
While the rise of these videos doesn’t guarantee we’ll be playing full-blown flash games on YouTube anytime soon, it’s a good reminder that some folks out there are really pushing the limits of most platforms. When it comes to interactive videos, they might be a great option for narrative-oriented games, but I’m ready to be surprised.
