In the Super Nintendo game, players can choose from among eight characters in the Mario universe—including Princess Peach, Mario, Luigi, and Donkey Kong, Jr. Each character has particular strengths and weaknesses. Bowser, for instance, is strong and travels at a high top speed but accelerates very slowly. Toad, on the other hand, is quick and handles well, but has a lower top speed. Once you choose a character (I recommend Luigi), you’re pitted against the seven other drivers in a series of increasingly surreal tracks. You might navigate a regular pavement go-kart track, or a ship of ghosts, or a castle, or the famed Rainbow Road, which has a many-splendored driving surface and no guardrails to prevent you from falling into the abyss below.

I was in tenth grade when Super Mario Kart was released, and as far as my friends and I were concerned, it was the greatest video game ever. We spent hundreds of hours playing it. The game was so interwoven into our high school experience that, even now, the soundtrack takes me back to a linoleum-floored dorm room that smelled like sweat and Gatorade. I can feel myself sitting on a golden microfiber couch that had been handed down through generations of students, trying to out-turn my friends Chip and Sean on the final race of the Mushroom Cup.

We almost never talked about the game while playing it—we were always talking over each other about our flailing attempts at romance or the ways we were oppressed by this or that teacher or the endless gossip that churns around insular communities like boarding schools. We didn’t need to talk about Mario Kart, but we needed Mario Kart to have an excuse to be together—three or four of us squeezed on that couch, hip to hip. What I remember most was the incredible—and for me, novel—joy of being included.

Like the rest of us, Mario Kart has changed a lot since I was in high school. In the recently released Mario Kart 8, you can fly and go underwater and drive upside down; you can now choose from among dozens of playable characters and vehicles. But at its core, the game hasn’t changed much. Mostly, you win contemporary Mario Kart games in the same way you won them in 1992, by driving in the straightest possible line and cornering well. There is a measure of skill involved—you can carry speed better through corners by drifting, for instance, and there’s some strategy to passing. But Mario Kart is almost ridiculously straightforward.

Except, that is, for the question boxes, which make Mario Kart either a brilliant game or a problematic one, depending on what you think games should do. As you navigate a track in Mario Kart, you may pass over or through question boxes, at which point you receive one of several tools. You might get a mushroom, which you can use to get a one-time speed boost. Or you may get a red turtle shell, a kind of heat-seeking missile that will go looking for the kart in front of you and hit it from behind, causing that kart to spin out. Or you might get the coveted lightning bolt, which makes all your opponents miniaturized and slow for a bit, while you remain as big and fast as ever. In the newer editions of Mario Kart, your question box might even provide you with the chance to transform for a few seconds into Bullet Bill, a speeding bullet that corners amazingly and destroys every kart in its path.