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Mario Kart 7 is a racing game developed by Nintendo EAD and Retro Studios for the Nintendo 3DS. It is the seventh console installment in the Mario Kart series (hence the game's title), and the second (the first being Super Mario 3D Land) installment in the Super Mario franchise overall (excluding crossover installments) to be localized to Dutch, Portuguese, and Russian. Additionally, it is the first Mario Kart game to be developed by more than one video game developer, namely Nintendo EAD and Retro Studios, and the second Mario Kart to have a different video game developer (not including the Mario Kart Arcade GP series), the first being Mario Kart: Super Circuit.

The main new feature of this installment is the hang gliding and underwater driving, which allows racers to glide through the air and race in underwater sections of the new and old tracks. Kart customization is also introduced instead of racing in pre-made karts like the previous titles. In the game, players can exchange Ghost data and play online in multiplayer mode. Players can also receive Ghost data via SpotPass and race against other player's Ghosts from around the world. Nintendo stated that the game brings "a bunch of new elements" to the Mario Kart series.

Mario Kart 7 was the first Super Mario game to use the Nintendo Network service, as it offered the ability to create custom communities, which would then become one of the features of the service; however, the service was terminated on April 8, 2024, making the game no longer playable online.[2][3] Once Nintendo introduced retail games that could be downloaded via the Nintendo eShop until its discontinuation on March 27, 2023, Mario Kart 7 was released in 2012 for the eShop, where it required 635.38 MB (5,083 blocks) to download.