After tens of thousands of attempts, Mario Kart fan finally pulls off Rainbow Road "ultra shortcut"
Lap it up.
Getting good at Mario Kart involves learning all the shortcuts: the ones Nintendo hides just out of view behind trees or waterfalls, and which might give you a small edge on your rivals as the finish line nears. But there's another class of shortcut altogether - ones dubbed "ultra shortcuts" by fans keen to break Mario Kart as much as possible by performing crazy stunts Nintendo had never intended.
Ultra shortcuts require frame-perfect timing, or knowledge of hidden geometry which bestows weird effects. And while you can pull these off using tool-assisted gameplay, the holy grail has been to achieve them manually. It just takes practice, and many, many attempts.
Today, French Mario Kart fan ArthuurrrP has been credited with being the first person to pull off Mario Kart Wii's final ultra shortcut - one which has been known about for years but only ever completed in tool-assisted runs.
First discovered in 2016, this ultra shortcut sees you skip almost the entire Rainbow Road course by turning around shortly after beginning, then boosting into and along the road's railings. You then need to perfectly boost over an enormous gap and land on the other side. Here it is in action:
According to eSports consultant Rod Breslau, tens of thousands of attempts have been made at trying to pull this off - before ArthuurrrP's successful run above.
For more detail on ultra shortcuts, YouTuber Summoning Salt has an excellent video breaking down the requirements for each and how they were found. Around the 30-minute mark, the video concludes by discussing the then-uncompleted Rainbow Road ultra shortcut which was finally achieved today.
