Jimmie Johnson fronts Anything With an Engine

Mario has often been acknowledged as the king of the kart racing genre, but there's a new challenger to the throne with no shortage of street cred. Publisher Autumn Games today announced Jimmie Johnson's Anything With an Engine, a kart-style combat racer set for release on the Wii, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 next year.

A five-time Sprint Cup Series champion, Jimmie Johnson holds the notion of racing "anything with an engine" as a personal motto. In keeping with that, Anything With an Engine will feature a variety of unorthodox, impromptu vehicles, including dumpsters, bathtubs, lawnmowers, and go-karts. The game will feature split-screen multiplayer, elimination-style circuits, and tracks packed with various traps and jumps.

Anything With an Engine is being developed by Isopod Labs, which has a reputation of its own for racing. The studio's only game to date has been the downloadable Xbox 360 car combat game Vigilante 8: Arcade, but the studio was founded by veterans of True Crime and original Vigilante 8 developer Luxoflux. As for Autumn, the upstart publisher was founded in 2007 and recently teamed with 4mm Games, Konami, and Terminal Reality to create the multiplatform Def Jam Rapstar.