2021 Minnesota Game Poster No. 7: Maryland

Click to enlarge.

Previous game posters:

Ohio State

Miami (OH)

Colorado

Bowling Green

Purdue

Nebraska

In this week's game poster, it's a parody of Mario Kart, with Goldy speeding away from Testudo at the finish line. In the place of Lakitu is P.J. Fleck, brandishing an oar instead of waving a checkered flag. Minnesota's stadium is in the background.

For this one, I referred to different iterations in the Mario Kart series rather than using just one. The original uses an aesthetically unappealing double-box setup to display both the map and the player. That would not look good as a poster, so I instead used the map overlay that appears in future games. Though the simple backdrop is meant to resemble Mario Circuit, I based the track on the roads going around the stadium. The turn onto Oak Street from 6th Avenue in the northwest corner is a bit sharp, but a player could navigate it smartly by drifting.

I came to the idea when thinking of turtles in video games, to represent Testudo. Bowser was an obvious comparison. It might have been too obvious, but I thought basing the poster on Mario Kart rather than on one of the battles against Bowser in a core game was a workaround. While I used Bowser as the base for Testudo's sprite, I "painted" Goldy on top of Yoshi.

Come back next week to see a game poster befitting a game the day before Halloween.