2022 continues to surprise us in ways we literally do not expect. Mario Kart 7, the portable incarnation of the game on the 3DS, has received its first patch in over ten years.

Originally released in 2011, Mario Kart 7 is somewhat underappreciated. Not because the game performed poorly in sales or was a critical bomb. Rather, Mario Kart 8 had thoroughly overshadowed it when it released three years later (on the Wii U!) that it literally faded from the public consciousness.

It’s unfair and also surprising; because many of the changes to the franchise that fans enjoyed in Mario Kart 8 were actually introduced in Mario Kart 7. Some of those features include customizing your vehicles, with parts like wheels and gliders, unlocking new parts to switch them out to your vehicle, and gliding sections and underwater sections in race tracks.

While not the first Mario Kart game to have online play, it is also notable for being the first portable game in the series to have it. The 3DS leveraged special online features that can still impress today. For example, Mario Kart Channel lets players see online activity via Spotpass and Streetpass. Players could form communities to race with special customized rules. Of course, you can also play online locally or with other players around the world, including with players you met via Streetpass.

Given the game’s vintage, it should probably not surprise anyone that there is now a large mod and homebrew community surrounding this game. Via modding, players have enhanced their online play further by adding their own customized characters, tracks, items, Waluigi, and others.

And so it was a genuine surprise to see Nintendo suddenly release this patch, months after the company had also removed the ability to add money and buy games on the 3DS.

On the patch notes for Ver. 1.2, Nintendo simply mentions that “Several issues have been addressed to improve the gameplay experience.”

A Dolphin emulator developer who goes by the handle OatmealDome opines that the patch is intended to remove a key security exploit. This may have been the same exploit found in Splatoon 2 and Animal Crossing New Horizons, because Mario Kart 7 may have used the same netcode those games had. That netcode was confirmed to be vulnerable to hacks and was removed immediately for those games.

Another independent dev, homebrew developer Pablomf6, has a different take. He claims he knows what was removed, but it wasn’t to remove mods. In his words:

“In fact, you should thank Nintendo for caring about this game 10 years later. <3”

Pablo seems to believe that whatever was removed wasn’t necessarily as serious as a vulnerability. For what its worth, Mario Kart 7 is one of those games you could use to hack a 3DS, if you had a physical copy.

Whatever the case, it’s quite curious to see the patch come out at all, three new Mario Kart games after the fact.

Source: Nintendo Life, Twitter