Mario Kart Wiicompiled will soon bring Nintendo’s classic racing action to your PC

TL;DR Mario Kart Wiicompiled is currently in development for PC, targeting an August beta release. The effort reflects the first static recompilation of a Wii title for modern hardware. The game will join a growing list of recomp projects, already targeting N64, Saturn, PlayStation 2, and additional platforms.

Emulators are very cool, making it easy to access vast libraries of our favorite games on modern hardware, like our favorite Android handheld consoles . But for as great as they can be, some very clever programmers have been doing one better, working to decompile and recompile classic games so that they run natively on today’s machines. We’ve already seen efforts to pull off this trick for games originally released on everything from the N64 to PlayStation 2 , and today we’re hearing about what’s supposedly the first such attempt for the Nintendo Wii.

Is there any game series more universally beloved than Mario Kart? Platformers may not be for everyone, but who doesn’t feel instantly at home behind the wheel of a shell-dodging go-kart? Already this month we’ve had the classic series on our mind thanks to a very creative playable YouTube version , as well as getting news of the end of the old Mario Kart Tour app .