West Michigan’s Mario Kart Champion

Jonny Rapelje, of Lowell, is West Michigan’s Mario Kart champion. Let that sink in for a minute.

By Justin Tiemeyer - Contributing Writer

11/17/2024

Jonny Rapelje, of Lowell, is West Michigan’s Mario Kart champion. Let that sink in for a minute.

Just about as long as there have been video games, there have been video game competitions. The first known video game competition was the 1972 Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics, hosted by Stanford University, where students played Steve Russell’s 1962 game, Spacewar!, and they played for keeps. Perhaps better known are the arcade face-offs of the 1980s, commemorated in the 2007 documentary, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. It was not until the year 2000 that the term “esports” was coined by South Korea’s Minister of Culture, Sports, and Tourism, Park Jie-won at the first annual 21st Century Professional Game Association meeting (now Korean e-Sports Association). Today, following the advent of online streaming, using platforms like Twitch and YouTube Live, esports teams are better known in some households than professional football, baseball, basketball, and hockey teams.

The Mario Kart 8 Esports Tournament took place on Saturday, October 12, 2024, at Kent Career Technical Center. Nicknamed the Kent County Cup, after the various competitions within Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, the Mushroom Cup, Flower Cup, Star Cup, etc., the competition was open to 9th through 12th graders throughout Kent ISD districts. “It was an incredibly friendly tournament,” Rapelje said, “despite it being a very competitive game.”

Rapelje has played Mario Kart 8 since it first came out in 2014 on the Wii U. Shortly after the Nintendo Switch debuted in 2017, the game was repackaged as Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. The game is so popular, it has not seen any sequels or spinoffs since its inception a decade ago, only additional downloadable content (DLC), circuits, and characters. Rapelje is a senior in high school now, which means that he was in second grade when he unknowingly began preparing for this event.

“It’s more of a casual thing,” Rapelje said, referring to his commitment to Mario Kart 8, “but I think once the Switch version rolled out, I really liked playing it. It’s a very, very fun game with good controls. It just feels fun to play by yourself or with family.”

Mario Kart 8 is not a game that sees a lot of competitive play, not like Rocket League, Counter Strike 2, Street Fighter, Tekken, and Super Smash Bros Ultimate. Rapelje played the latter for Lowell High School’s esports team during his freshman and sophomore years.

“I believe going into middle school and high school, it never really crossed my mind that my school would have an esports team,” Rapelje said. “The only teams I really saw were the big, official ones with all of the major funding.”

Now that esports are on Rapelje’s radar, he is considering college options, based on the quality of their esports teams. Rapelje recently took a tour of Ferris State University. “They have a very good esports team there with an objectively professional-looking esports area,” Rapelje said. “I’m sure it’s very competitive.”

Ferris State has gone so far as to offer an esports production degree program which focuses, per the esports production homepage, on “production, content creation, streaming, and user interface design.” Rapelje is currently debating between an esports degree and a more traditional computer programming degree. “Winning this has made me realize that I have options in those areas,” Rapelje said.

Folks who believe a tournament like this is won by button-mashing and luck might be surprised at the amount of skill and strategy that goes into a competitive game of Mario Kart 8. Rapelje outlined a number of strategies for success, like trying to stay in first at all times, hanging-out in third or fourth to get slightly better items, and hanging out in last place to get all of the best items before making a mad dash for the finish line. Rapelje attributed his success to track knowledge and getting speed boosts by drifting. He even shared some tricks for how to avoid the infamous blue turtle shell, which automatically strikes the first-place player.

“If you’re in first, you can actually dodge the blue shell if you time a mushroom speed boost just right,” Rapelje said. “If you don’t have a way to dodge, you can brake really quickly and get into second place.”

Rapelje’s current favorite game is Destiny 2, which he described as a shooter game with good story and fun gameplay. In the timeless battle between Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy franchises, he chooses Zelda but admits that Final Fantasy VII Remake and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth were Zelda-quality. Outside of gaming, Rapelje plays viola for Lowell High School’s Jazz Fusion Orchestra.

At this time, there is not a broader tournament system for Mario Kart, so instead of setting his sights on regional, state, or national tournaments, he is aiming to unseat the 2024 champion, Kenny “KnLeaf” Nguyen, at Kent Career Technical Center’s second annual Super Smash Bros esports tournament, coming in the spring of 2025.