Abstract: Nintendo’s Mario Kart is perhaps the most popular racing video game franchise. Players race alone or against opponents to finish in the fastest time possible. Players can also use items to attack and defend from other racers. We prove two hardness results for generalized Mario Kart: deciding whether a driver can finish a course alone in some given time is NP-hard, and deciding whether a player can beat an opponent in a race is PSPACE-hard.
Conference paper, by Jeffrey Bosboom, Erik D. Demaine, Adam Hesterberg, Jayson Lynch, Erik Waingarten, published in Japan Conference on Discrete and Computational Geometry and Graphs (JCDCG 2015)