Let’s be honest. The most appealing thing about speed
skating is the possibility of seeing the competitors bump slightly and careen
into a comical pile-up. It’s like NASCAR, except the odds of death by
fiery explosion are far lower. Michael Shanks, an Australian filmmaker who also goes by the name “timtimfed,” went ahead and took the slippery Olympic event to its logical conclusion by turning it into Mario Kart.
Shanks, who has previously melded the real world
with video game worlds in his Skyrim and BioShock Infinite
videos, dropped the Mario Kart series’ item boxes and shells into
some footage from the Sochi games. The skaters get taken out by green shells and chuck banana peels, and there are a couple of little treats for folks who are familiar with the particulars of Mario Kart. (One nice touch: The
background music is a sedate remix of the track that accompanies Mario Kart Double Dash’s “Baby Park,” which
is just an oval and is the closest a Mario Kart racetrack has ever gotten to verisimilitude.) There’s also a surprising amount of gore. Less
surprising: The racer in last place had to go and ruin it for everyone by using
the blue shell. [via Laughing Squid]