Honko

17-year-old Robin

20-year-old Robin

31-year-old Robin

45-year-old Robin

no no no

Robin Who??

Robin Usher is a Mario Kart player and staff member. He is originally from the USA, but spent most of his childhood in Japan, so he sometimes pretends to be Japanese. He now lives in California, studying computer science in university.

Kart Career

Robin has been a member of the kart community since 2003, when he joined the Mario Kart 64 Player's Page. It was the first video game he ever played competitively, so at first he moved slowly from the bottom of the charts. However, after a couple years of playing he eventually made a breakthrough and went quickly from Semi-Pro to Elite B in Summer 2005, and then Elite B to King B in Summer 2007. Robin's favorite course is Rainbow Road, where he also has his best ranked time, a Legend C flap. In the past couple years he has played sparingly, but he still gets an occasional PR and has no plans to ever "officially" retire.

Robin's second Mario Kart was Super Mario Kart. He enjoys SMK a lot and usually lists it in his 10 favorite games, but he has never gotten deeply into time trials there. His last PR was in January '08, when he received an MVK award on the Non-NBT site but then stopped playing just barely before entering the top 100. Robin's favorite course in SMK is also Rainbow Road, although he falls off at least 10 times every time he plays it in GP mode.

Robin was an active Mario Kart Wii player during the early days of the site. He had some good success in the first couple weeks, holding many North American regional records (especially on the N64 retro courses) and briefly obtaining double SRs on Mushroom Gorge when the shortcut was first discovered, but he stopped playing time trials after two months and has since fallen out of the top 100. Robin was also a leader of the "MK64 Stars" clan that dominated the Wifi scene for those first few months, where he raced under the nickname Honekko.

Robin is also a member of the Mario Kart Super Circuit, Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, and Mario Kart DS pages, making him one of the few players to be ranked on all 6 sites. However, the vast majority of Robin's karting time has been spent on MK64, so his rank in these other games is quite low. Perhaps someday if he gets "maxed out" in MK64 he will consider putting serious effort into climbing the ranks of another Mario Kart.

Staff Member

Much more than his karting abilities, Robin is known for the various contributions he has made to the community as a staff member. In 2004, Robin joined the staff of the MK64 site by introducing the Rivalry feature for comparing three or more players at once. Similar rivalry pages were soon added to the other kart sites. Robin continued updating the MK64 rivalries manually for many years until recently when an automated version was created for the new MK64 site.

Although the rivalries were Robin's original claim to fame, he has always been eager to help out the MK64 site wherever he is needed, which has led him to take on a wide variety of jobs over the years. Most notably, he was the times updater for over three years, and he distributed the POW Awards for 2007 and 2008. Robin also helped out at the MKWii site early on, updating time submissions there for the first six months.

Robin has used his knowledge of Japanese to help the community in other ways as well. He translated the Join pages for MKDD, MKDS, and MKWii into Japanese and has helped contact and recruit Japanese players for all the sites.

Community

Robin is known as Honko on the message board, where he is a moderator and an active poster with over 3000 posts. He has organized several alternative challenge tournaments on the MK64 board, and ran the All-MK Team Tournament that included members from each kart game. More recently, he is often the host of the board's Mafia games. Robin is also a long-time member of the #mariokart IRC channel, where he likes to cause trouble and call people names. Robin organized the Karter Contest 2k8 and reached the 3rd round before being eliminated.

Other Stuff

Robin has loved basketball since he was born. He played on his high school team, where his height was a powerful advantage against his vertically challenged Japanese opponents. He is tragically a life-long Sacramento Kings fan, no matter how much they suck.

Hunko

Hunko is Robins boyfriend, whom he fondly loves.

External Links

• Robin's SMK profile
• Robin's MK64 profile
• Robin's MKSC profile
• Robin's MKDD profile
• Robin's MKDS profile
• Robin's MKWii profile