Shigeru Miyamoto's Toad Picks Create a Delightful Mario Kart Mystery

Shigeru Miyamoto's relationship with Toad may be one of the stranger tiny mysteries in the long history of Mario Kart. In a 2012 interview, Nintendo's famed Mario creator gave a straightforward answer when asked which racer he preferred: Mario. He described Mario as a balanced character and presented the choice as a matter of habit.

Then came the follow-up question: which character was his least favorite? Miyamoto answered, "Toad." Pressed on the apparent contradiction after the interviewer noted Toad's popularity, Miyamoto added that he understood the mushroom-headed character had fans "somehow." It was an amusingly blunt response, particularly considering how central Toad has been to the wider Mushroom Kingdom cast for decades.

But footage from several years later has made that answer much harder to take at face value. In promotional play sessions following the launch of Mario Kart 8, Miyamoto sat down with YouTube creators Smosh, iJustine, and Rosanna Pansino. In each known session, he selected Toad as his driver. Not Mario, the supposedly dependable all-rounder. Not a new character intended to show off the Wii U entry's roster. Toad, every time.

The observation was highlighted by SpriteCell and shared more widely by Supper Mario Broth, turning an old exchange and a handful of game demonstrations into a particularly charming Nintendo trivia debate. Was Miyamoto joking in 2012? Did his opinion change between the interview and those 2014 and 2015 appearances? Or did he intentionally choose a character he had publicly dismissed because he found the contradiction funny?

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A Mario Kart Choice That Does Not Add Up

On paper, Miyamoto's original answer is not especially surprising. Mario is the series' defining character, and across many Mario Kart games he has traditionally occupied a balanced slot in the roster. Players who want to learn a game's mechanics without committing to extreme speed, weight, acceleration, or handling traits often gravitate toward characters designed around that middle ground. Calling Mario a habitual choice sounds entirely plausible for someone who has played countless iterations of Nintendo's racing series.

The Toad comment is what adds the comic edge. Toad is not merely a background Mushroom Kingdom resident. The character has appeared beside Mario since the earliest days of the series, hosted adventures, served as Princess Peach's attendant, and built a strong following through games including Super Mario Bros. 2, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, and the many multiplayer Mario spin-offs. He is also one of the most recognizable racers in Mario Kart.

That makes Miyamoto's deadpan-sounding answer memorable, but the later Mario Kart 8 footage makes it genuinely puzzling. The three appearances point in the same direction: when a controller was put in Miyamoto's hands, he went with Toad. One isolated selection might be nothing. A player may pick a character randomly, follow a host's suggestion, or simply choose whatever portrait is closest. Repeating the same pick across separate sessions is enough to make people wonder whether the 2012 remark was ever meant literally.

There is no confirmed explanation, and that uncertainty is important. The available clips establish a pattern in the games Miyamoto played with Smosh, iJustine, and Rosanna Pansino, but they do not explain why he chose Toad. It would be easy to turn the contradiction into a definitive claim that Toad is secretly his favorite character. The evidence does not go that far. It is a funny coincidence--or perhaps a deliberate gag--not an official ranking of every Mario character.

The Case for a Running Joke

The most entertaining possibility is that Miyamoto was committed to a long-running bit. His 2012 answer already carries an element of playful evasiveness. Asked about a favorite racer, he apologized that he could not offer a more interesting response. Asked about a least favorite, he landed on Toad and then lightly brushed aside the character's popularity. The exchange may have been less a serious critique of Toad than an opportunity to give a surprising answer.

If that was the intention, selecting Toad during later Mario Kart 8 demonstrations would be a wonderfully understated continuation. Viewers would have no reason to connect a character-select screen in 2014 or 2015 to a brief 2012 interview answer. It took years and careful attention to bring the two details together. That delay is part of why the discovery has amused Mario fans: it transforms a routine promotional race into a possible punchline delivered long after the setup.

There is also a simpler possibility. People do not always select their favorite character when playing a game, especially in a casual social setting. A veteran player might use a character they consider awkward, unusual, or less familiar to create a little self-imposed challenge. Someone may also choose a racer because another person at the session has already picked their usual main. And sometimes a player just hits the same option because it has become a different kind of habit.

Toad's repeated appearance could therefore mean affection, irony, convenience, or nothing more than a preference for that particular Mario Kart 8 setup. The appeal of the story is that none of those readings can be conclusively proven.

Why Toad Is Such a Good Character for the Mystery

Toad is an ideal figure for this kind of fandom debate because the character has always had an unusually flexible role within Mario games. Depending on the title, Toad can be a guide, a helper, an anxious bystander, a heroic adventurer, a racer, or one member of a large group of nearly identical Mushroom People. That versatility has helped make Toad familiar without always being defined by a single dominant personality.

In Mario Kart, Toad has also changed considerably from game to game. The series has regularly adjusted character classes and vehicle systems, meaning a player's attachment to a racer can come from the feel of a specific entry rather than from lore or visual design. A Toad selection in one game does not necessarily carry the same mechanical meaning as a Toad selection in another. By the time of Mario Kart 8, the game's kart customization and stat combinations gave players many more variables than the character choice alone.

That context makes it difficult to read too much into the selections as competitive decisions. Miyamoto may have been picking Toad for a combination, for familiarity, for the color scheme, or for reasons that had nothing to do with performance. The fact that he once described Mario as balanced does at least show that character handling was on his mind when discussing his own play habits. Still, no record from those later sessions explains the Toad choice.

A Small Detail That Captures Mario Kart's Lasting Appeal

Ultimately, this is not a major revelation about Nintendo's internal development or the future of the Mario series. It is a compact piece of gaming history that has endured because it feels so relatable. Every Mario Kart player has a character they claim not to like before selecting that character anyway. Sometimes it is because the racer performs well. Sometimes it is because a sibling always used them. Sometimes the choice simply becomes automatic.

The difference here is that the player is Shigeru Miyamoto, and the character in question is one of the most enduring faces in the world's most famous video game franchise. That raises the stakes of an otherwise trivial menu selection just enough to make it memorable. Fans can now look at those Mario Kart 8 sessions and see either a creator quietly revising his opinion, a competitor embracing an unlikely pick, or a veteran designer having a private laugh.

One preference does seem far less ambiguous. Miyamoto has repeatedly expressed deep affection for Pikmin, a series closely associated with his creative work and one he has described in especially personal terms. In the imagined hierarchy of Nintendo favorites, the tiny plantlike creatures appear to have a secure place near the top. Toad, meanwhile, remains in a much more complicated position: publicly dismissed, repeatedly selected, and forever capable of prompting one more round of Mario Kart speculation.

Until Miyamoto clarifies the contradiction himself, the Toad question will remain exactly what it should be: a lighthearted mystery built from old interviews, character-select screens, and the enduring habit of players choosing the racer they insist they do not like.