Atari Karts

Atari Karts is a kart racing game similar to Super Mario Kart featuring single-player and multiplayer modes, where the main goal is to finish a race ahead of other racers controlled by the computer and other players. Before each race, a traffic light will appear to start countdown and the race begins when the light turns green. The players take control of one of seven characters available at the start of the game, each with differing capabilities, and drive karts around tracks from a third-person perspective behind the player's kart. When selecting a character, another player can join at any given time.

Among the roster of racers, Bentley Bear from Crystal Castles (1983) is a playable character. The players can access an options menu where various settings can be changed such as controls and the type of terrain display when racing.

Atari Karts was developed by the Belgian group Miracle Designs. The team wanted to make video games after visiting Visual Impact, a Ghent-based development company founded in 1994 by Kris Van Lier and Claude Verstraeten, who were working on Hyper Force for the Atari Jaguar. They walked into the Atari booth at the ECTS and applied to be developers, receiving a Jaguar development kit and resulting in Miracle Designs' formation. Filip Hautekeete and Peter Vermeulen began working with the kit, creating a demo showing an emulated interpretation of Mode 7, a graphics mode found on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, to test the Jaguar's capabilities and sent it to Atari producers Bill Rehbock and J.

Patton. Impressed with the demo, Atari decided to make a title that combined F-Zero and Super Mario Kart with a cutesy atmosphere, becoming the starting point for the game's production.

Atari Karts garnered a mixed reception from critics, all of which compared it to Super Mario Kart. GameFan's Dan Granett found the game visually impressive for Atari Jaguar standards, citing the use of details, colors, and parallax-scrolling backgrounds. Nevertheless, Granett criticized its lack of depth and easy completion, as well as the soundtrack. Mega Fun's Ulf Schneider commended the karts for being easy to control and the colorful bitmap graphics but expressed mixed thoughts about the audio.

Schneider ultimately felt that the game did not measure up to Mario Kart. He also noted the difficulty of drifting in curves using the keypad while driving. German publication ST-Computer concurred with Schneider on most points but recommended the game to Jaguar owners, highlighting its split-screen multiplayer. In contrast, Computer and Video Games' Paul Davies was very critical, stating "How Atari have a hope when pitching this kind of rot against Sega Rally, and Wipeout I do not even try to understand."

After the release of Atari Karts on the market, Miracle Designs began working on a sequel but never moved forward beyond the planning phase. Merlin Racing, a 2000 racing game created by Miracle Designs and released for Nuon, is considered a spiritual successor to the game. In 2003, Miracle Designs split the game's content across four separate titles released for PlayStation: Rascal Racers, Miracle Space Race, ATV Racers, and XS Airboat Racing. Miracle Designs would later work on titles such as Hooters Road Trip and an adaptation based on the 2003 action comedy film Taxi 3. Hautekeete and Vermeulen would go on to co-found Neopica, the sister studio of Sproing Interactive.