Mario Kart Player is First Human to Perform Nearly Impossible Skip

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Hard work. Determination. Mario Kart. One player has done the nearly impossible, landing an ultra skip on Rainbow Road in 2008’s Mario Kart Wii.

The player, who goes by @ArthuurrrP on Twitter, landed what’s called an ultra skip with an extremely low chance of actually being done. In Mario Kart Wii, an ultra skip is one that abuses the game’s mechanics to skip a majority of the track. Usually, these skips take the form of massive, impossibly precise jumps across tracks. They require hours of practice and patience to get down, and even more time to be able to do consistently.

This skip in particular is nearly impossible. Until this day, it had not been performed by a human, only being done by TAS, or tool-assisted, bots. It requires incredibly precise movements, with even one missed input resulting in the skip failing. The player has to hop across a barely-visible piece of the track alongside the fence at the beginning of Rainbow Road, jumping for extra speed boosts. They then have to jump off of the track, landing on another far off one.

as seen on reddit, after 5 years and tens of thousands of attempts, @ArthuurrrP is the first human to achieve the Mario Kart Wii Rainbow Road ultra shortcut and lap successfully. Arthur the god pic.twitter.com/J52B8NEqHw
— Rod Breslau (@Slasher) January 14, 2021

However, just getting the skip isn’t enough. The player also has to land on a specific part of the track they’re jumping to in order to skip the lap they’re on. Landing outside of this particular area means the game won’t count the lap when the player crosses the finish line. Specifically, @ArthuurrrP is the first human being to land this skip and lap.

It’s a huge day for the Mario Kart community, one that likely won’t arrive again for months, if not years. Now we wait and see if someone can pull of any similar skips in Mario Kart Live: Home Circut or Mario Kart Tour.