Choco Mountain: The History of Mario Kart 64's Most Infamous Track

This is Choco Mountain, it is the third circuit in the Flower Cup in Nintendo's Mario Kart 64. And honestly, it doesn't look too crazy at first glance, it's just a brown circuit with a white sky, no crazy driving backwards or underwater like in the new one. In the games, the walls are practically on top of you, so you don't have much room to navigate the

track

, but you see this course has a certain reputation, there is a group of people who have been fighting each other for the past. A couple of decades to finish the course in world record time, which draws these players to Choco Mountain in particular.

Well, probably the fact that this tour can be totally and completely broken. Let's start by taking a close look at the

track

itself. Choco Mountain starts with some rapids. turns towards the top of the course followed by a long 180 degree turn that puts you inside a tunnel. During each of these turns, it is optimal to do what is known as a mini turbo, press r to jump and begin the turn to drift. white smoke coming out of the bottom of your cart, then push the control stick in the opposite direction of the turn and push it back again, the smoke should turn yellow, do the same with the control stick again and the smoke It turns orange, that means your mini turbo is full and when you release R you will get a slight increase in speed.

It looks like it will be a slow process, but a skilled player can run dozens of these mini turbos in a row across the field throughout the entire start. Choco Mountain is a loop around a

choco

late

mountain

, as you can see in this aerial view. After going through the tunnel, you drive through a winding section with hills on either side and then do another 180-degree turn around a pool of water with rocks. drop from the top, then another right turn, some more bouncy hills and you're done with the turn, doesn't that seem so crazy? That's probably what

most

people were thinking when this game was released in North America in February 1997, but it wasn't.

It wasn't long before people realized that there was a lot more to this clue than met the eye and it all started with a shortcut that was discovered literally right after the game came out, although several players probably discovered the shortcut independently of each other. It was first documented in an email from legendary Mario Kart 64 player David Wan on April 19, 1997. The email provided the following instructions for shortcutting through Choco Mountain as usual until reaching the part where you can see the overpass on your On the left, in time trial mode, you can see a guardrail on your left, go to the part just before it starts to descend and then turn 90 degrees to the left, drive towards the wall and press the r button to jump at about the time you hit.

Jump directly over the wall. This little technique became known as wall jumping pretty much everywhere in the game. If you hit a wall and press r to jump, the instant before you hit the wall, you will jump off the wall and go. Much higher Mario Kart 64 runs at about 30 frames per second in the NTSC version, so in

most

situations you only have 30 seconds to time a wall jump, but since your card travels so fast sometimes it's not possible to time the wall jump at all, the window you have, the jump is actually smaller than the length your cart travels in a frame if you go at maximum speed, so sometimes your cart jumps that perfect position and Hit the wall before you have a chance to jump.

It is known as zero frame jumping and when it happens your car falls like this looking at the aerial view of Choco Mountain it is easy to see why this saves so much time the shortcut is done here and you are jumping from the bottom to the top When the designers made this course, they placed both ends of the loop around the water side by side. The idea was to put a railing on top so you wouldn't fall on the bottom and put a wall next to it. to the bottom so you couldn't reach the top, but when it was discovered that the watchman practically removed the barrier from the wall, as long as the players could press the r button at the right time and didn't get squared away.

They could skip the long circuit around the water with falling rocks and save a few seconds on that same email. David Juan provided the first two shortcut world record times for Choco Mountain: 2986 for the fastest single lap and 132.53 for the fastest three laps. Unfortunately, no video exists for any of these moments and I couldn't find a photo of them anywhere either, yet the timings were particularly important because they laid the groundwork for the two ways Chocolate Mountain could be played, either without shortcuts where you drive like normal or shortcut where you jump the wall and over the next few months in 1997 there were reports of players reducing shortcut times as they realized that you didn't need to stop to jump the wall and instead you could just slide towards the On a wall like this, a guy named Kevin Booth supposedly lowered the world record for 3 laps to 128 and someone with the nickname Abe apparently lowered it to 122 and then came June 24, 1997.

David Wong would send another email email that day and was about to reveal to the world more about

choco

mountain

if you thought the wall jump was crazy, get ready david wan is about to completely destroy a choco mountain juan had already discovered a shortcut on the chaco mountain, the gray wall jump, but this email had three more and the kicker all three were discovered within the same 24 hour period shortcut number one after completing 7 16 of a turn, go immediately left and jump climb the mountain quickly jump with the r button while driving towards the mountain if you do this from the right At this point you will completely clear the mountain and your cart will flip for a few seconds and land just behind three hills immediately behind the finish line .

Let's see what's really happening here. The player's goal is to get from approximately this location to approximately this location. Normally if you try to jump down the side of any hill or mountain on the track, you will simply fall when you reach the top, but as you can see in this 2008 video by Matthias Rustemeier, there is a polygon here at the top that you can barely jump over, if you do you will fall to the other side, skipping the whole shortcut number two just before you get to the big hill before the overpass area, go straight to the wall to your left and go all the way in. speed up and jump when you hit it, if you do this in the right spot you will clear the wall and land in the same area as the first shortcut, this shortcut was pretty much a faster version of the jump ladder shortcut that you end up clipping. a little less of the track for when you save yourself from not having to jump up and down the wall, more than makes up for it.

Shortcut number three at the start of the course, simply drive around one car forward from the starting line. and drive towards the wall on your left with the help of a mushroom, jump with the r button while hitting it and you could land on the top of the mountain if you do it correctly. Blackity will pick you up and place you right in the tunnel. one might seem like the craziest of them all, but actually what was happening was that you were boosted to the point where the track overlaps, the game thinks you're right next to the tunnel, so it places you inside it.

When you come back down, unfortunately, Juan also mentioned that he didn't think it was possible to do the pull in time trial mode, as he had only gotten it to work in 150cc Grand Prix mode. Your top speed is slightly faster in 150cc than in time trials and since you needed to jump so high, the more speed you had the better, now that the floodgates were open, world records were available for any expert player who wanted to achieve them. David Juan was once again the first to do so. so, by providing times of 23.81 for the fastest lap and 114.52 for the three fastest laps of Choco Mountain, the jump and climb shortcut ended up being pretty useless for their purposes, as it was slower and more difficult than the hill jump, the huge wall jump shortcut at The Start didn't help him much either, as the world records were made in time trial instead of 150cc, but this hill jump was huge, it saved him about 5 seconds per lap over the gray wall jump and it wasn't incredibly difficult, just the time to jump correctly. and I hope they didn't zero you in, that's where Juan's 5 second time savings over Juan's old single lap record came from and how he was able to shave so much time off the three lap world record.

His strategy was to do a hill jump and Drive the best he could for the fastest lap and do a hill jump once in each lap for the three lap record. As time went by, more skilled players appeared to lower the speed. record, but you have to keep in mind that the speedrunning mentality was different. In the late 90's I operated more from a system of trust and respect, if you are a respected racer who can demonstrate your skills through live appearances or some video tapes, the most reasonable times you have submitted will be accepted even without a lot of evidence.

The record races had no video evidence and were not well documented aside from old websites and Yahoo group posts, so it's nearly impossible to decipher exactly who held world records in Mario Kart 64 from the late '90s, per what I could collect. The Chocolate Mountain world records changed hands several times in late 1997 and early 1998. Jason Walls, Kevin Booth, Jonathan Bernier and possibly a few other people took turns lowering the Choco Mountain shortcut records at 97-98, but a guy named Alex Penniv would finish. changing the playing field up to this point no one had held any choco mountain shortcut record for more than a few months penisev would end up holding the choco mountain three lap shortcut record for a total of four years and 10 months he would end up holding the a lap record for a total of over six years penov is well known for having sprinted in dozens of games at very high levels almost every

mario

kart

game other

mario

games and zelda just to name a few his first Choco Mountain's record achieved was the lap record on September 30, 1998.

He would proceed to break this record 12 times. The only time he didn't hold this record from then until December 2005 was a one-year span from August 2001 to August 2002, when Miller also held the record. He realized that tunnel work at the start was possible in time trials if you drift towards the wall this way. He saved about two seconds and by using it he lowered his lap time to less than 20 seconds. His reign over the three-lap record was similar. He first achieved it in October 1998 and lowered it seven times. The only time he did not hold this record from then until December 2005 was a two-year period from May 2000 to August. from 2002 when simmons held the world record now there is one very important distinction i have to make about alex penniv, he played in the pal version of the game, the ntsc version of mario

kart

64 runs at about 30 frames per second while the pal version of the game runs at 25 frames per second, this means that the power version only ran at 5 6 the speed of the ntsc version, so not only would the game play in slightly slower motion on pal, but that all times would also be about 17 slower to compensate for this, the mario kart 64 community created the combined range. system that could accurately compare the times of each version of the game, a 30 second lap in pal for example would be equivalent to a 25 second lap in ntsc, for the sake of simplicity I'll refer to the majority anyway of pal times as its ntsc equivalent.

Penna was able to take the fastest lap time by about half a second to 21.58 seconds by driving better and then to about 19 and a half seconds by using the tunnel jump. He was taking tighter corners with cleaner mini turbos while doing a hill jump. every time I lowered the time from three laps to 107 32 in 2002 doing the same in the first months of the release of mario kart 64 four shortcuts were found on choco mountain over the next few years, in their place zero new shortcuts were found, some They were theorized in the early 2000s. Miller theorized a trick where he would bounce off the tunnel wall and activate the next loop to start, although he received some very strange bounces from the walls, he was never able to get his trick to work. greg i from the mario kart forums also theorized that the trick was very similar to the existing wall jump at the beginning of the track, only instead of being picked up by lakitu, you would stay to the left while jumping andYou went completely over the wall and landed on the runway.

Then once again, however, while this trick was tried, no one could get it to work. Yes, Choco Mountain was still an unsolved puzzle, although some pieces were put together, it was clear that there was still a lot more to the clue that had yet to be solved. It has been found, but as they looked for more shortcuts, they thought they could also get more world records. On the single lap side, Shadow of Miles was able to achieve a lap of 1.768 in 2005, which was over a second and a half faster. that pendef's best time was the same route of doing a tunnel jump at the beginning and then doing a hill jump, but his hole jump was so clean that he landed safely on the track without needing to land on the other side , this lap would end Carlo stood for over four years to achieve the three lap record and Miles took turns lowering it with the help of a tunnel jump and three hill jumps.

Recorded races were much more common at the time, but as you can see in Carlos' videos, they weren't always like that. of the highest quality, a camcorder recording from a VHS tape was sometimes the best we had. Well, now we move on to the year 2007 and it's time to introduce you to one of my favorite sprinters of all time. Maybe you haven't heard of it. before but you're definitely not going to forget it nowthis is vaj vaj started getting mario kart 64 world records in the mid 2000s and in 2007 he was working on choco mountain on may 8 of that year he got a new world record for 112 50 on a friend, equivalent to a one minute flat time for ntsc was performed by executing three hill jumps and two tunnel jumps like most, this time he submitted to the Choco Mountain leaderboards on mariokart64.com, but He was too excited to do it right away, instead he turned on his camcorder and filmed his reaction right away.

This is what I'm talking about, world record girl, let's do it again, check him out, he's as big a character as Vaj. He's also an incredibly good Mario Kart 64 player, one of the best to ever play the game, in fact, this three lap time. one of them stood for almost seven years and in the meantime was breaking world record after world record on almost every other track in the game, one of those world records was for Choco Mountain, in one lap it lowered the four year old world record and a half of Milo. in 2010 before being defeated by carlo and then finally reduced it to 1759 or 21-15 on friend in 2013.

Unfortunately, this time he did not record a reaction video, but provided a video of the race itself, no new strategies . were used, it was all just the tunnel jump into the hill jump once again, but you can see how well he was cutting all of his turns, he was trying to leave no room for error for anyone to beat his time, so now we're in 2014. vaj is in control of both Choco Mountain shortcut records and for the last decade the discovery of new strategies has been pretty dormant, but remember that in 2005 Greg posted about a theoretical shortcut where you would jump completely over the wall at first and you would land on it for nine years seemed to be nothing more than a theory and then in February 2014 Greg posted this on the Mario Kart forums.

Greg mentioned the possibility of this trick and nine years later he was the one who did it for the first time. He hit the wall in the perfect spot, stayed left and was able to completely clear the wall to land on the track below, as you can see this trick would jump the entire circuit at the beginning, just like the old tunnel jump did, but instead of having lakitu. Pick yourself up while the timer is still ticking, you simply land and continue driving. The key to this trick was the setup instead of sliding into the wall and using a mushroom you had to perform what is known as a block boost if you hold b and use. a mushroom while touching a wall, the wall initially stops you and drastically increases your speed when you free yourself from the wall, you will fly forward at a really high speed, so high that when you jump off the wall you will be able to clear it completely and sleep being picked up by lakitu This trick would become known as the Gregg style named after its creator, it saved around two seconds on the old tunnel jump and during February 2014, Greg and Zorin took turns lowering the one lap record until it reached 1588 held by greg now greg posted his forum around 9:30 am on february 2, 2014 mario kart 64 players from all over the world immediately flocked to the thread to congratulate him on his find, some were amazed by the find while others were shocked.

They were surprised. ready to try to break the world record, however, one person's reaction was different than the others, this guy, whether or not he is commonly called Weatherton in the Mario Kart 64 community, Weatherton is a mario kart 64 tasser, someone who plays on an emulator with tools like slowdown. everything moved frame by frame and saved states to create a theoretically perfect race. Weatherton was also excited about this new discovery, but he immediately had the idea to do it even better at 1 pm on February 2, about 3 and a half hours later. Greg Weatherton's original post said he thought a sub 10 second lap was possible.

His idea was to jump off the wall, fly to the left and land out of bounds on a certain polygon somewhere around here and then be placed behind the finish line by lakitu and finished the lap, so he used his task skills to try to make it work the next day, February 3, at 7:30 in the afternoon, he posted two discoveries, one he couldn't perform his trick and two, he had just found a different trick. probably the craziest trick in the

history

of mario kart 64 tanko time a six second lap how is it possible the answer lies in how the game handles the checkpoints around the track we know from the old tunnel jump that if you You get stuck at the top of the hill the game thinks you are in the tunnel and Lakitu will leave you there because of the weather. tanko, you have to hit a very precise spot on the wall so that your character catches on the wall slightly, this also makes the game think that you When you are in the tunnel, once you go back down, as long as you are behind the finish line, the game will think you are at the end of the lap, so all you need to do is cross it.

A six-second lap was miles ahead. What anyone would have dreamed of could be possible, but keep in mind that this was a tool-assisted sprint race, so it was not a world record but rather a proof of concept. Just because someone could prove the trick was possible didn't mean a human could do it. everything went well, but this trick had many parts, it needed to not hit the zero frame bounce high enough, hit exactly the right part of the wall and bounce far enough to the left to land behind the finish line, some of the highest ranked players. everyone started trying to be the first human to perform the trick vaj, who is ranked number one in the world in shortcuts, greg, who is ranked number two, and other top players like miller and jones, in july 2014, five months after the trick had been performed.

I discovered that no one had yet been able to land the Weathertenko, they came close and did all kinds of jumps near the top of the wall, but it was too precise for anyone to land until at least August 3rd. That day someone posted that they had finally been able to land. Take out the tanko time, but it wasn't vaj or greg or any of the really highly ranked shortcuts players, it was the 29th ranked shortcuts player, a guy with the username abney317 589, this beat the old record by a single lap for 10 seconds and as you can.

Imagine that people were scared, this was Abney's first world record not only in choco mountain but in all mario kart 64 speedrunning no one could take it from him for a few months, but that november the competition heated up again on november 5, 2014, patricio managed to take the record from abny with 544 abney decided that he didn't feel like losing the weather tanko record, so he made a few attempts on the same day and beat patricio's time twice, finally he lowered the record to 488, but guess who he recovered time. very next day to break the Apne record, look at this, I beat the stars, second man, I don't have the replay because I pressed start and it happened in 10 minutes, just 10 minutes, man, 10 minutes after my 5 17 in the first round.

Like you know what we tried on the second lap and then I hit it, I went all the way, I just hit it, hit this room, I jumped up and now I hit it, I was like it's every day, I got 'em, man, if you just bet, check this. I would hold this 3.26 record for a few months, but Abny would end up tying and eventually surpassing his time in the early months of 2015. Abny would continue to lower the single lap record closer and closer to three seconds. However, in subsequent years the three lap record was a little different, it was a story that had not yet been written before the weather tangle was discovered, you would have to drive around the track and perform as many hill jumps or tunnels as possible to obtain a world record, the weather tank will completely change the playing field.

You'll be given three mushrooms to work with in the time trials, so you could hit three weather tanks, one on each lap, and finish the entire race super fast, possibly in under 20 seconds. At the end of 2014, you had to wonder how many weather tanks someone could hit in a single run over a period of time. The answer was only one. Abney posted a pair of sub-minute three-lap records shortly after landing the first weather tank. In November 2014, both were done by running a weather tank at first and then trying to perform as many hill jumps as possible.

Afterwards, on January 16, 2015, Abny once again made

history

and became the first person to perform Two weather tanks in the same run this reduced the 3 lap record to 44 seconds and that's where it stood for over a year. It hit three out of every three possible tankers, I mean, in theory, it was, but Abny's odds of hitting a climate tank on any try were only about one in forty. He needed to hit three of these in a row, so the odds were The chance of an attempt being able to hit three weather tanks in the summer of 2017 was about 1 in 64,000.

Abney made the decision to try. to get a three out of three weather tanko run and nothing was going to stop him he was going to start hitting one weather tanko he immediately set up and hit another and then immediately set up and hit a third back to back and I know what many of you They're probably thinking right now. Why did Abney bother doing this? He was literally starting his stream only to hit a wall over and over again for a few hours. You'd think it would be incredibly boring. watch him do these attempt sessions, but that wasn't the case at all, he streamed all of his attempts on Twitch and the chat there was filled with hundreds of people eagerly awaiting the one race that would be the one that watched him as the counter attempts of him.

It climbed higher and higher, first it passed ten thousand attempts and then it passed twenty thousand. Most people wouldn't have had the patience to do these attempts almost every day for weeks, but Abny knew that the chocolate mountain was at its breaking point. , not even a type of jump that had almost killed the most

infamous

clue in the game, all it took was one try, oh god, man, we got two out of three and I already got both, a perfect try that would earn it the title of one of the most legendary speedrun world records of all time.

Yeah, come on, come on, that's it, yeah, come on, 26,461 tries later, Abny had achieved what was thought to be impossible. choco mountain had been nearly destroyed all the years of discovering shortcut after shortcut taking world record after world record had finally culminated in a three out of three weather tanko at the time I'm making this video no one has replicated this feat and I can't imagine what would someone have to resort to to lower the three lap record, since the one lap record, on the other hand, was recently taken under 3 seconds by a guy named frankie yes, abney tied this time a couple of days after and has been trying to get it down since then, in total 13 people have been able to do a weather tanko and 11 of them did it in time trial mode, the fastest time coming from the aforementioned world record and the slowest time coming from Theodore fifth nine, another couple of quick things I should mention, this game was released in Japan before it was released inanywhere else in the world, so Japanese players had their records before anyone else and may have had faster times than the rest of the world for a while, however it's not really documented anywhere online, for making it impossible to add them to the timeline and of course there is a completely different side to choco. mountain, the side without shortcuts, which is currently dominated by Mathias Rustemeier.

No wall jumping allowed. Hill jumping or tanker trucks are allowed. Perfect driving through the countryside. Matisse is definitely one of the best people to ever play Mario Kart 64. Maybe the best ever next time. you are playing mario kart 64 try to play choco mountain see if you can jump some wall or skip some part of the track maybe you will be the next david juan and discover new shortcuts or the next apne and you will defy the odds to hit three weather studs in a row again, Whatever it is, you can be sure you've done it on the most

infamous

track in the game.

Thanks for watching, if you like watching speedruns be sure to follow me on my Twitch channel. twitch.tv call for thanks