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Shakespeare Wrote ‘King Lear.’ My Brother Built a 100-Foot ‘Mario Kart’ Racetrack in His Basement.
How to make your own Rainbow Road
They say William Shakespeare wrote King Lear during quarantine for the plague in 1606. During Covid-19, my brother, Adam Gossage, created his own masterpiece of sorts in his basement: a 100-foot working replica of the most beloved (and loathed) racetrack from Mario Kart: Rainbow Road.
The inspiration for the project was Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit, an augmented reality game for Nintendo Switch that lets you race webcam-enabled toy cars IRL against virtual opponents — around a course you build in your home. But the real impetus for all of this was being laid off from his job back at the end of March as a sales consultant at a high-end speaker manufacturer in Lawrence, Kansas.
Amid shutdowns and an impossible job market, Adam decided to go all in on gaming. Since the NES days, he’d been obsessed with video games, particularly Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs) like Persona 4 and Final Fantasy. He’d obsessively followed gaming YouTubers like Cooltoy, RKG, and BeatEmUps, and had dreamed of starting his own channel. He teamed up with his brother-in-law and next-door neighbor Jordan Goldsmith, and they launched Complete Geek TV on YouTube and Twitch in April. (Clearly, a lot…
