Mario Kart 8 Deluxe’s new character select screen hints at more Booster Pass racers

The latest update for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has a surprise, as there are now five additional slots for new characters to appear in the game. This means that even more of racers from previous games could be included as part of Booster Pass to turn the game into the ultimate Mario Kart experience.

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It was revealed during a Nintendo Direct that Birdo would be added to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe as part of the Wave 4 Booster Pass update, as a freebie alongside the new tracks that were coming to the game. Now that the Wave 4 update is available, the character select screen has been modified to make way for Birdo, which now includes five question mark spots, suggesting that this is the number of new racers that will be added to the Booster Pass.

Nintendo has confirmed that more racers are coming to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, but no one realized it would be this many. There are plenty of candidates for these five slots, as prominent characters from previous games never made the jump to the latest entry in the series, including Diddy Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Petey Piranha, R.O.B, and Funky Kong. It’s also possible that some of the new iterations of existing characters from Mario Kart Tour or the Bandai Namco characters from the Mario Kart arcade games, like Pac-Man, could make it in.

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There are many options for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe characters, and that’s not even considering brand-new characters for the series, especially as the game has already opened the door for non-Mario characters to be included. For all fans know, a character like Captain Falcon, Samus Aran, or Fox McCloud could be the next racers to make it into Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, turning the game into the racing equivalent of Super Smash Bros. that everyone has always wanted.