Editorials > Interview with Troopa

Interview with Troopa
4/22/2003

The following is an interview with the Founder, Owner, Webmaster, etc. of Mario Kart Central. Basically, Troopa does almost everything. He's even writing this interview!

First things first. How good are you at Mario Kart? :)
I'm better than most people I would say. I'm not as good as some experts, such as Sami Cetin, Mark Jones, or Simon Laflamme, but I'm good. Expert players such as the ones I mentioned have personally taught me a lot about Mario Kart, which I pass on to other people with the site. They deserve credit for that.

Give us the history of the site. When was it started?
The site was started in August of 2002 and only covered Super Mario Kart. I wanted to create a site to be hosted by ClassicGaming.com, sort of as a little challenge to myself. I also applied for hosting from PlanetNintendo.com. A couple of days later I received an email from PlanetNintendo saying that they had enough sites that cover Mario games and didn't need anymore.

I also emailed Deezer from The Mushroom Kingdom and asked if he would affiliate with me. He expressed interest in affiliating with me but only if I was going to cover all of the Mario Karts games. I considered it and at first didn't think I wanted to devote the time and emailed him. I kept having many ideas which I could do for the site, and it seemed like it would actually be fun, so I changed my mind and decided to go through with it. I later emailed him and let him know but didn't get a response. From what I hear he gets a lot of email, so I was probably lucky to get a reply in the first place.

I then spent many hours at first working on the new site, 4 to 5 hours a day at least in the beginning for a week or so. After I got it all up, I bought the domain name Mario-Kart.net. I started letting people know about my site on forums, and I also paid a little bit of money to get some advertisements on Google to get the ball rolling. It was only around $10, and I figure that's very inexpensive compared to other hobbies or activities I'll have in life.

Pretty soon I had some people signing up on our forums. Jax, GameCuber, and Y2kMISFIT all offered to help bring in more traffic to the site and they also agreed to moderate the forums. I'm grateful for their help because they really did help get the site going even more.

After about a month or so we were getting 100 unique visitors a day, so I re-applied for hosting with PlanetNintendo.com. I knew if the site was hosted with them then our visitor base would increase quickly by at least 150%. And I was confident that even though they said they "had enough Mario coverage" that they would host me since there is no other site out there that covers all of the Mario Kart games like Mario-Kart.net did. Sure enough, they emailed me a few days later and said that they accept my application for the hosting.

So I started working on re-coding the site to add the advertisements. This is the only downfall with the deal... ads. Mario-Kart.net did not have any advertisements but I knew it was worth it to be hosted by PlanetNintendo. The increase in visitors would make up for the ads, and in my opinion I don't think the ads are really a big deal anyway. There are ads on TV, the highway, the radio... of course there will be ads on the Internet! And our visitor base did increase, even more so than I originally thought. We went to 200 visitors a day, then 300, 450, 600. I had the realization that lots of people like Mario Kart! And we keep growing and growing, in visitors and in site content.

That's quite a little story. So why did you choose to create a site anyway?
For many years I've wanted a "popular" web site. Just something that gets at least 50-100 visitors a day. I thought of creating an emulation site since that was a sure way to get visitors quickly, but I decided not to. It wasn't just about the visitors, I also wanted to create something unique and useful. I had many web sites in the past but none managed to get more than 5-10 visitors a day... I guess most people don't care about reading my thoughts about life, God, etc. How many people have been to a little-known web site that has a lot of that? I'm sure many of you have. They're interesting, but unless you're famous or have some other good things on your site it can be hard to get noticed.

So anyway somehow I decided to do a video game web site, and I chose Super Mario Kart. I looked on search engines and followed links but really couldn't find a good Mario Kart web site that had nice maps, strategies, pictures, etc. there for you to explore. So I followed some good advice, "to be successful, find a need in the world and fill it."

And that's what I did. There are plenty of Half-Life sites, plenty of emulation sites, and plenty of general Nintendo sites, so I found something unique and went with it. No other site that I have found has covered all of the Mario Kart video games. Don't get me wrong, there are other great individual Mario Kart sites such as the Super Mario Kart Time Trial site and MarioKart64.com, but neither of them offered as much to explore and learn as Mario Kart Central does, especially if you're not interested in Time Trial competition. Their communities are great, the players share strategy with each other and challenge each other to keep on improving which I really like.

And so I started on the Super Mario Kart site, and the rest you can read above! I really do enjoy working on the web site and on computers in general.

You have said that Super Mario Kart is your favorite of the series, why?
Mainly it's just the feel of the game. I have the most fun playing the original. I'm not trying to be retro or anything, that's just how I feel about it. However I do think that the most fun thing to do in any Mario Kart is some good 4-player battle mode or Vs. racing, and for that Mario Kart 64 is a must.

Well that's it for now, thanks for the interview!
My pleasure, any time. If anyone has any questions or wants to share their opinion, then please contact me. Keep on karting!

This interview was taken April 13, 2003.