ぽんぽこカート 〜ニッポン爆走グランプリ〜
Free · play online in your browser, no download
Eight yokai and animal racers, three Japanese courses, drifts, items and paper-umbrella gliding. The README says Claude Code built it from one request in about two hours.
Official site tanuu5.github.io, verified Nov 3, 2026. Linked as the play address (“▶ ブラウザで遊ぶ”) from the developer's own GitHub repository README (tanuu5/ponpoko-kart); hosted on the developer's GitHub Pages.
Rights holder / original work: Mario Kart (Nintendo)
The README calls the game a Mario Kart-style 3D kart race and an unofficial fan-made work inspired by Nintendo's Mario Kart series, not affiliated with Nintendo, and says its characters, courses and music are all original. We found no Nintendo names, characters or assets in the game's code. No source shows a licence from Nintendo. (GitHub)
VibeGameDB lists this game only to document that it was made with AI coding tools. We do not host it, we do not represent the rights holder, and listing it does not mean it is licensed.
Where to play
Every platform this game is on. Links are checked against official sources; we never host or mirror games.
- Play free — official siteBrowserReleased · Keyboard or gamepad; the developer's note of 27 Sep 2026 says it did not support smartphones at the time of postingFree
Runs in a desktop browser. No download.
Browser (no download) · Official link verified Nov 3, 2026.
About ぽんぽこカート 〜ニッポン爆走グランプリ〜
ぽんぽこカート 〜ニッポン爆走グランプリ〜 is a free 3D kart racing game for the browser in which eight racers (a tanuki, a fox, a cat, a shiba, a rabbit, a kappa, a tengu and an oni, each with slightly different speed, acceleration, handling and weight) race three laps on three Japanese-themed courses: a country road between rice paddies at sunset with a level crossing whose train sends you flying, a castle town in cherry blossom with a mountain road through a thousand torii gates to a five-storey pagoda, and a summer-festival night with food stalls, lanterns, a hot-spring town and fireworks. You can choose 50cc, 100cc or 150cc. Holding the jump button while turning starts a drift whose sparks change colour for a bigger boost on release; there is a rocket start, tricks off ramps, and glowing ramps that open a Japanese paper umbrella so you can glide over rivers and gorges. Items include a three-colour dango boost, a rolling daruma, homing shuriken, caltrops, a beckoning cat for invincibility and a metal washtub that drops on everyone ahead of you; gold koban coins raise your top speed. It plays with the keyboard or a gamepad, in Japanese. The README describes it as a Mario Kart-style 3D kart race and an unofficial fan-made work inspired by Nintendo's Mario Kart series, unaffiliated with Nintendo, with original characters, courses and music. The README credits planning and direction to the developer, たぬ (tanuu5), and development to Claude Code (Claude Opus 5.5, reasoning level MAX), which built it from a single request in about 1 hour 55 minutes. Terrain, buildings, characters, karts, music and sound effects are all generated in code, with no image or audio files. Free on the developer's GitHub Pages site; the code is MIT-licensed.
How it was built
Partially verifiedThe README credits planning and direction to たぬ and development to Claude Code (Claude Opus 5.5, reasoning level MAX), and says Claude carried the design, code, staging and testing as one continuous piece of work from a single request. The main agent built the courses, kart physics, the CPU drivers' AI and the rendering, while six sub-agents worked in parallel on the countryside props, the shrine and cherry-blossom props, the festival props, the kart, character and item models, the music and sound effects, and the menus and HUD. Visuals were checked with screenshots from headless Chrome on a real GPU, and an autopilot using the same driving AI as the CPU racers lapped each course to find spots where karts got stuck or left the track. The README's token table gives about 1 hour 55 minutes of work, 841 API calls (222 by the main agent, 619 by the six sub-agents), about 2.91 million output tokens and about 32,500 lines of source code (77 JavaScript files plus HTML and CSS); it excludes a later bug fix and the publishing work.
- DeveloperDeveloper's note post of 27 Sep 2026: ぽんぽこカート is one of four browser works that Opus 5.5 made, one a day, from 23 to 26 Sep 2026, all made with code only, without image or audio files. — note (たぬ / tank_ai)
Built by Claude Code (Claude Opus 5.5, MAX) from one request, with six sub-agents working in parallel on props, models, audio and menus. Rendered with three.js (WebGL) and built with Vite, published to GitHub Pages by GitHub Actions. Courses are splines with generated road, ramp and boost-pad meshes; water uses planar reflections, grass and rice are instanced, and music, sound effects and ambient sound are synthesised with Web Audio. The game uses no image or audio files; three fonts are loaded from Google Fonts.
- Engine / framework
- Three.js
- Languages
- JavaScript
- Team size
- Not disclosed
- Initial build time
- About 1 hour 55 minutes, from one requestDeveloper ReportedGitHub
- Development time
- Not disclosed
- Development cost
- Not disclosed
- AI-written code
- Not disclosed
“技術スタックはお任せしますが、可能な限りリッチな見た目の3Dで、マリオカート風のゲームを作っていただきたい。ステージは日本らしさを感じるもので、例えば田舎の田んぼ道であったり、そう言うラインナップでしょうか。”- Source on GitHub (tanuu5/ponpoko-kart, MIT)
- Developer's note post with the “Four Days, Four Works” video (Japanese)
Verification notes: AI use, the request, the token table, features, controls and licence (MIT) come from the developer's repository README, read through raw.githubusercontent.com on 5 Nov 2026; the README links the play address, which loaded that day. The creator statement is the opening of the first request as quoted in the README. The README has no update history, so the release date is not stated; the developer's note post of 27 Sep 2026 places the game among works made one a day from 23 to 26 Sep 2026 and marks it as not supporting smartphones at the time. The README calls the game Mario Kart-style and an unofficial fan-made work inspired by Nintendo's Mario Kart series, unaffiliated with Nintendo, and says its characters, courses and music are original; we found no Nintendo names or assets in the game. The game's text is Japanese and we found no language option. The bundled script contacts no AI services. The repository's stars and commit history were not checked (github.com was not reachable from our checker). Team size and location are not stated.
Development history
The developer's note post lists the game among four browser works that Opus 5.5 made, one a day, from 23 to 26 Sep 2026.
Developernote (たぬ / tank_ai)
Game performance
Each figure measures something different — concurrent players, owners, downloads and sales are never interchangeable and are never added together. Labels show where each number comes from.
Browser (official site)
No public metrics recorded for this listing.
Not publicly available: Concurrent players (site), Monthly revenue, Gross revenue.
Sales & revenue (all platforms)
Browser game — there are no downloads to count.
Reviews & rankings
Not yet reviewed by our editors.
Not currently ranked.
Sources
| Source | Type | Published | Accessed |
|---|---|---|---|
| tanuu5/ponpoko-kart (README) GitHub · Japanese | Repository | Not confirmed | Nov 3, 2026 |
| Claude Opus 5.5 に動画を3本作ってもらった：自己紹介・系譜・作品集PV note (たぬ / tank_ai) · Japanese | Devlog | Sep 27, 2026 | Nov 3, 2026 |
| Official game page (language check) たぬ (tanuu5) | Official site | Not confirmed | Nov 3, 2026 |
