How to get the Kamek item in Mario Kart World and all unlocks

Kamek is a new item that appears in Mario Kart World, which, despite causing some mischief, is needed to unlock a large portion of the hidden characters available in-game.

When Kamek is used, everyone in front of the player turns into a different character, and on certain courses, you can get unique characters that, upon being hit by Kamek, become permanent characters in your roster to play at any time.

You’ll know if you got the Kamek item as he appears as a purple orb, like a magic ball, that appears behind the player. When activated, Kamek will appear in front of you before flying off and affecting every racer in a better position than you. He will then spawn enemies in front of the first place that’ll try to disrupt the race.

Finding Kamek can be a rare occurrence, though, but if you happen to find him. Using Kamek on certain courses will unlock one of many hidden characters. The unlockable characters include the following:

If you want to try and unlock them all, its best to go into a VS. match on single player against CPUs and hope that an NPC fires a Kamek off against you during those games until you unlock the character you want, or hold back yourself below 12th place to try and increase the odds of you finding the powerup yourself. Please note, though, that if you are the one who uses Kamek, you won’t unlock the character, and only the people who are transformed will.

I haven’t tested this myself, but I’m wondering if it would be possible for a second player to use Kamek, and if another player gets hit with Kamek, the whole party unlocks the character on the same system? One to test and come back to.

It also sucks that the inclusion of Kamek as an item likely means he won’t appear as a playable character… or will he? Guess we need to wait for any future potential DLC to find out the answer to that.