Mario Kart Arcade GP is the fifth installment of the Mario Kart series and the first one released for arcades. It’s notable for featuring a crossover of characters from the Super Mario and Pac-Man franchises. A little tangent upcoming but I actually played a Mario Kart Arcade GP game before near where I live. I say “a Mario Kart Arcade GP game” because there is also a Mario Kart Arcade GP 2 game and I’m not sure which one I played. However, it was a fun experience even if the arcade controls took some time to get used to. A random fun fact that I just learned about Mario Kart Arcade GP is that it apparently runs on a modified version of the Mario Kart: Double Dash!! game engine according to Super Mario Wiki.
However, there is an even more interesting, if possibly disturbing, fact about Mario Kart Arcade GP that not a lot of people may know about. That fact is that there is an image of a very horrific real life event inside the game. There are three unused image files inside the arcade racing game, with the first two being innocuous.
This first JPG looks like a color text made during the development for the game.
The second image depicts people with costumed mascots at the Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan.
The third picture is the most controversial one of the group and shows people running and taking cover in Beslan, Russia with a soldier with green camo and a rifle in hand taking cover as well.
One of those three images is definitely not like the others. The third picture is of the Beslan school hostage crisis, also known as the Beslan school siege and the Beslan massacre. While the image itself is not graphic, it’s the history behind the image that matters. It was an Islamic terrorist attack carried out by the Riyad-us Saliheen terrorist group against a school in the town of Beslan, North Ossetia in the North Caucasus region of Russia. The purpose of the terrorist attack by the Riyad-us Saliheen was to terrorize and force Russia to withdraw and recognize the independence of Chechnya, which the Russian government continues to deny after ending the centuries long conflict in the Chechnya region in 2017. The violent takeover of a Russian school lasted three days from September 1, 2004 to September 3, 2004 and involved the deaths of more than 330 people, most of them being children. Not only did people lose their loved ones to violent terrorists, but many citizens inside and outside Russia criticized the government’s handling of the hostage crisis. The high death toll from the Beslan school hostage crisis has given the tragic event the distinction of being the deadliest school shooting in world history.
Below is a video from the YouTube channel Everything History discussing this horrifying event in greater detail.
So after explaining the history behind the image in depth, one crucial detail remains-why is this image in Mario Kart Arcade GP in the first place? The general consensus online in places such as Reddit is that it could’ve been a placeholder image for something else later in the game’s development. As of the present, however, no one involved with the game has commented on the image in question or explained its purpose for ending up in the game’s files.
Sources
The Hidden Vault 
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