My son's cub scout den recently put together an arcade machine. I only put two games on it for now, Ostrich Riders and Super Tux Kart. I was specifically looking for 2 player simultaneous games. For Ostrich Riders, I added an "arcade mode". In that mode, I remove most of the options for example configuring the controls for the player. I added support for keys '1' and '2' as 1 player and 2 player buttons.
I would be great if Super Tux Kart could have an arcade mode. Make it so you can't enter story mode. Have 1 player and 2 player buttons correspond to single player/multi player modes. Remove the ability to configure the controls. (The way I handle configuring for Ostrich Riders is to configure it outside of arcade mode and then setup EmulationStation to call it with arcade mode argument.) I would still want the quit option so that you could get back to game selection.