Well, this is the best Christmas present the retro scene has gotten in years.
Super Mario Kart Deluxe — better known as SMKDX — finally has a release date: December 25, 2026. The massive fan-made expansion of the 1992 SNES classic has been quietly growing into one of the most ambitious ROM hacks in the scene’s history, and the date landed in the team’s teaser video before the developers sat down with Time Extension for a full interview about the home stretch.
This one has been cooking for a long time. According to the interview, SMKDX actually started life as two separate mods before MrL314 and ScouB joined forces in December 2021 — one adding prototype battle modes and restored cut content, the other restoring prototype tracks. Since then they’ve covered each other’s blind spots: ScouB handling artwork and design, MrL314 doing the programming heavy lifting, with original artwork by Cajarito and music composed by Pinci. As MrL314 put it, they don’t want this to be a forever project — and now the finish line is in sight.
The feature list is genuinely absurd for a 16-bit game. Eight new racers join the original eight — Wario, Daisy, Bowser Jr., Kamek, Waluigi, Birdo, Dixie Kong, and Toadette, with Dixie as the real curveball — for a 16-driver grid. Six new cups add 50 race tracks and 10 battle tracks, each with unique podium scenes. There’s a mission mode with 81 missions and custom bosses (inspired by Mario Kart DS), plus Endurance mode, Shine Thief, Gate Battle, and Battle Race for multiplayer mayhem. New items include the Blue Shell, the Blooper, the P-Balloon (a Super Mario World homage that trades control for distance), the Yellow Shell, and — the one every Super Mario Kart veteran dreamed of — playable CPU items like the Poison Mushroom and fireball. Throw in mirror mode on every track and six speed classes from a gentle 50cc all the way up to a frankly terrifying 300cc, and you’ve got a whole lost sequel hiding inside a 1992 cartridge.
One of my favourite details from the interview: none of it overwrites the original game. SMKDX sits alongside the base content as an expansion, not a replacement, and it runs on real SNES hardware as well as emulators. NTSC is the focus at launch, with a PAL version planned. You’ll need your own legal copy of the original ROM — the project is a patch-only fan effort, unaffiliated with Nintendo, which is exactly how these things should be done.
The five years of digging through the original code also turned up some wonderful secrets — the team found evidence of a scrapped last-chance 1-up roulette system buried in the code, and discovered the Grand Prix camera was a degree off all along (they had to fix it because it messed up aiming in mission mode). That’s the kind of forensic love letter only a community project could write.
The project’s own materials make no statement about generative AI being used in development, so there’s nothing to disclose on that front — just years of human tinkering, palette-wrangling, and boss-fight showing off.
December 25th is a bold date, and fan projects have a habit of slipping. But this is the closest SMKDX has ever been to real. So — which of the 16 racers are you maining on Christmas Day?
Sources: Time Extension and Console Classics