On April 21st, the Cerritos esports group held its Mario Kart event to an exciting evening of races being held.

The event was held on the Cerritos esports Discord server, Discord is a popular application used by gamers around the world to connect with each other as well as used for events such as this one was.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was the video game that was played during this event, I was among several players participating in this event.

A somewhat of a tournament was held on Mario Kart 8 Deluxe online mode by the Cerritos esports group which is where all participants, myself included entered the lobby that was set up for this specific event.

We played a couple of races just for fun to get some practice in, then the competition had begun, it was a first to win 10 races between all the contestants.

Sarai Salazar, biology major, a first year student here at Cerritos College was the winner. He made it to 10 races in 1st place.

When asked how long she has been interested in competitive gaming she said, “I have had an interest in competitive gaming since 2019, mostly in Super Smash Bros. and Rivals of Aether.”

I also went ahead and asked her if she has a favorite video game to which she replied, “I think my most favorite video game is Pokémon, more specifically its spinoff, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky, I grew up playing that video game so much when it had just released around like 2009 and still play it a lot to this day.”

When asked about the event Salazar said, “Today was really exciting, Mario Kart is such a great game to play competitively or casually, its a game anyone can pick up and play and I hope we get to play Mario Kart here more often.”

Something Salazar went on to tell me was about how she hopes the esports and gaming community can continue to grow saying, “Being in the Cerritos esports community is such an amazing thing to be apart of because you don’t really see schools do these types of things at all and the community is so welcoming to everyone – I hope to be apart of this a lot longer to see where it goes in the future.”

Overall, it was a fun experience that had a lot of incredible moments and I got to meet some nice people, I do hope this community continues to thrive and expand for years to come because gaming can bring people together no matter their background and I would highly recommend joining the Cerritos College esports group to anyone looking to have fun, play video games competitively or casually, or just to hang out.