Frappe Snowland: The History of Mario Kart 64's Most Broken Track

Mario Kart 64 has a reputation for being pretty

broken

, it's certainly one of the

most

fun games on the Nintendo 64, but its courses have been abused and exploited much more than the average racing game. We've already seen this about molten chocolate, but it turns out and that's not the only circuit that speed racers have destroyed fraps Nolan has become famous for his exploits over the years, his world record is coveted and racers fight to the fastest time with and without shortcuts, so today let's take a look at how those world records were achieved. have been lowered, let's take a look at the

most

broken

track

in the most broken Mario Kart game.

The first thing to understand about Mario Kart 64 speed racing is the different categories to complete a single

track

time trial, however, you must drive it three times. Sprinters also compete to see who can drive a single lap of a track the fastest, so two big categories are whether or not a speedrunner is attempting a three-lap record where they drive around the entire course. three times or a short flap record for the fastest lap. where they only do one lap and within each of those categories there are two more categories, shortcuts and non-shortcuts, a shortcut in Mario Kart 64 is usually described as doing anything that the developers probably didn't intend for you to do to save time, so something like going through the tunnel and Koopa Troopa Beach is not a shortcut, but launching Yoshi too far to the left so that Lakitu gets confused and places you diagonally backwards across the finish line to skip a lap is considered a shortcut.

Yes, that's real. shortcut in this game so those are the four categories of fraps without LAN time trial shortcut three turns without shortcut three shortcuts to the left and shortcuts without shortcuts let's start with the shortcut without shortcuts the objective here just drive one lap around fraps In the land as quickly as possible, the early

history

of world records in Mario Kart 64 is not easy to show, mainly because there are no videos for many of them. Fortunately, the MK wrs comm website has compiled a list of world records over time, so we know. which was probably the record, but back then the proof needed to claim the world record was different, it was difficult to post videos on the internet for people to post their times on old Yahoo group posts or just emailing others, it operated From a system of great trust and respect, if you were a respected member of your community, your times would be respected too anyway, Fraps Knowland's no-shortcut lapel record was shaved a few seconds by a handful of American and Canadian players , but then some guy named Pen f just destroyed it. the record sees the NTSC version that came out in North America and some other places runs at 30 frames per second while the PAL version runs at 25 frames per second, so the PAL version essentially runs in slow motion and plays approx.

At 5/6 the speed of the NTSC version this meant that an equivalent time between NTSC and PAL would be approximately 17% slower on Powell, so to compensate for this a combined rating system was created that balanced times between NTSC and pal, regardless of which version you played. Your time would be on the same leaderboard, regardless of what time you submitted, it would be submitted with double NTSC time and a friend time that was 17% slower. Playing in PAL is generally considered a bit easier since you're playing in a slightly slower tempo. slow motion, so for the sake of simplicity I will refer to all time as its PAL equivalent.

At the turn of the century, Powell's team had dropped to 39 seconds ahead of Mike the first time, 38 seconds, in the early and mid-2000s, the first. Videos of world records began to appear. Some of these videos were not shot in 4k quality, so we'll take a look at this one from Carlo from 2006. 38.7 beat a world record by 0.02 seconds. There are a few things to pay attention to here. First of all, the mini turbos every time Carlo spun, he usually did what is known as a mini turbo. By swerving with the R button, the player can move the joystick back and forth twice and the smoke below will change from white to yellow to orange once orange.

The player can release the drifts and his character will gain a slight speed increase. Ideally, the player should do this over and over again to get as many speed boosts as possible. Carlo played his toad as Yoshi and Peach are tied for the fastest character in the game. game, the course itself is pretty simple, you can see from this aerial view that it's just a loop surrounded by snow that goes too far into the snow and makes you lose your balance if you picked up on lakitu, but you can move forward a little. a bit while staying within the limits, although your Kart slows down, so Carlo uses three mushrooms and strategic spots on the snow to cut the track's curves.

The first was at the beginning of the lap, while the second and third were on these little hills. of snow Carlos' record only stood for two days before being surpassed by a legendary streak by a player known as MJ, a thirty-eight point six eight that lasted an incredible six and a half years and was finally surpassed by Zoran, who then he was defeated by the one and only v aj v aj was known for his rather excited reactions to his world records, but this time he was a little more subdued, yes, since the VA Jays record in 2012, 15 new records have been set, all which come from only two players, Mateus.

Rusty Meyer or Mr. and Dan Burbank Matthias held the world record in early 2014 with a thirty-eight point six zero, but Dan saw potential to lower it primarily based on the hill they used, the second mushroom on Matthias was taking this hill with a more aggressive attitude. jumps than players in the past cutting corners more and saving you time Dan worked hard to perfect this by jumping to the left in the air and backing to the right to land closer to the runway. He also started making a mini turbo a little earlier after this. I'll be drunker than Matthias in both situations.

We're talking small amounts of time, save a few hundredths of a second, but in a race so precise, every frame counts, these two players traded the record back and forth for a few months. dropped from 38 60 to 38 50 and finally to 38 40, you might think that since the game runs at 25 or 30 frames per second, players can only gain time in increments of about 0.04, but the game has a precise message to Determine when you finish determines how much of your cart is over the finish line at the end of a lap, giving you a different hundredth of a second based on that, so it was actually possible to improve by just 0.01, most of Dan's record up to this point was actually played on NTSC instead of Powell, but Dan switched to playing on Powell in early 2015 and once he did he set four world records in a row, but Matthias eventually started to switch a second mushroom jump to make it more like Dan's, once he did it he got a world record of 38 point 2 9 to this day Dan has not been able to beat that time, he has been so close to getting his point lowest of thirty-eight point three zero, but Matthias's record has stood for more than four years, so that's it for the flop without shortcuts. record it's time to talk about some shortcuts this is the story of this shortcut failure record welcome to 1997 surely after the game came out a guy named David Juan started posting about the discoveries of shortcuts he was finding and one of the craziest ones he discovered was the one in May 1997 on fraps in the dirt, going backwards at first to the bridge and then going straight out into the snow, passing the finish line that extends outwards to start the lap and then going out of bounds, the game thinks here at the end of the turn.

When Lakitu leaves you, all you have to do is move forward and you're done many times over. This trick works because of Mario Kart 64's strange way of keeping track of where you are. There are 646 markers around the track that the game needs. determines where your Kart is if you are within 20 markers of the finish line, the game knows you are close, so it will add a lap if you cross the finish lines and subtract one if you cross it in the opposite direction, the starting point cut to The 20 Ammar kurz is right in front of the bridge, so if you go into the snow there and lose your balance right after the finish line, the last game has your location set 20+ markers away so that do not subtract the The first lap, Lakitu takes you back to the finish line and you are at the end of the next lap.

Players quickly scramble to figure out how to apply this trick to a black record and this record by a player named Miles from 1999 shows what it was like. was found to be the fastest method, this is one of the oldest known world records from Mario Kart 64 with the video: miles traveled the end of a lap and then jumped from the bridge into the snow and positioned themselves just before the end of They turned around and continued. the very edge of what is considered still bounced and then moved forward slightly, the turn ended and he was immediately out of bounds and was picked up by lakitu being placed in a mushroom at the right time and the drift was all that was needed in This time of 5.40 or 6.49 on Powell was essentially the lowest he could go this time and was matched by some players in subsequent years, but then in 2004, Miles discovered a new way to lower the shortcut record.

This version did not involve the bridge but did involve the right area. behind the finish line, probably one of the most broken regions of any track in any racing game, has to do with this polygon to the left of the finish line, it has the same property as the bridge, where if you land there, the game no We did not subtract one turn on the way down, so the player had to cross the finish line and then find a way to turn left to reach the polygon. The problem is that the player would normally be marked as off balance before getting there, but hey, this is Mario Kart 64, so of course there is a way around it, this time it's thanks to a trick called the lakitu effect, After putting you down, Wackadoo has a short period of time where you can't get back up even if you lose your balance.

The player could reach the end of a lap off balance, be picked up and immediately turn left and use a mushroom bump off the hill to get air, barely cross the finish line and then turn back to left towards the polygon before Lakitu can finally stop you and pick you up, when Lakitu places you, you are much closer to the goal than with the bridge method, so you can finish the lap about half a second faster, again , the players changed the record. The next few years eventually brought it down to a four point nine zero ntsc time where it was a three-way tie between Greg I miles and V AJ, but then on September 6, 2014, Miles sat down to record a video tutorial on how to do it. the shortcut and while he was explaining how to do it this happened, did you see that he accidentally beat the world record by one hundredth of a second?

Something legendary this time was equivalent to a five-point 88 over Powell a couple of years later, this strategy would be once again, this time it would be improved by a guy named Marcos by initially becoming unbalanced a little closer to the finish line, lakitu I'd place it a little further forward, then I could do a slightly different version of the shortcut by getting a big Bounce off the base of the hill, landing a little closer to the polygon, and finally getting picked up by the lat a little earlier. Standing near the finish line once again saves only a little bit of time compared to the old shortcut, but it was a lot. a little tougher Marcos lowered the record to five point seven seven in July 2016, which is where the record stood for over three years, but in mid-2019 a player known as Abney three one seven was closing in on him with a 5.8. 3, he was making attempts live on his twitch stream to get over it, but it was an incredibly difficult strategy to pull off.

It took hours of attempts to try and achieve a five-second lap. Oh, he had done most of the shortcut correctly, but it bounced off him. was strange, he moved forward and said left, hence his exasperated reaction, he was not in the correct polygon and the trip would not work, turn right, he must have thought it would not work and by all estimates this attempt should not have been made. it worked, but instead he beat Marco by a full tenth of a second, it turns out that understanding how the trick I mentioned a couple of minutes ago worked wasn't accurate, he didn't have to land on that highlighted polygon.

With a little preparation, landing on any of these polygons would work. Abney had crossed thefinish line, so the game thought he was on the next lap, he bounced over the hill and crossed over these polygons, which since he reached the end of a lap making the bridge shortcut is mapped to give him a position of more of twenty markers behind the goal line, then moves slightly to the left while looking to the right crossing the goal line, but since the game thought it was behind marker 20 it didn't subtract a turn so it was at the end of the lap despite not being as far to the left as normal and when picked up he simply drove forward to finish it, he had taken a more direct path towards the polygons instead of going left saving him time in the world record fraps of Frames.

Nolan's shortcut record is crazy, but perhaps the only strategy crazier than that is driving three of those laps with the crazy precision needed to get a world record. Welcome to the three-turn shortcut. It looks like this, the three shortcuts on the left strategy is extremely technical and revolves around using the bridge shortcut right after the race starts, you turn around to go to the bridge by holding a and V to turn, you continue turning with a B and continue towards the snow. then go out of bounds where necessary, upon hitting, place the bridge, player A B turns again to reach the snow and then this repeats so the player can simply move forward to finish the left for the first few years.

After the shortcut was developed in 1997, it was the usual suspects who toppled the record. Penna had a dominant run in the late '90s, reducing the record to within 26 seconds of Powell. Once in 2002, M came out of the street and set five records in a row, but none of these old records seem to have surviving videos today, but in 2003 this strategy for the field changed a little if ttyn realized that it was actually a little. Faster to go to the left, the thing bounced and placed it to the right, so starting in 2003, when players stood on the bridge, they quickly did an a/b turn and then turned left and then exited quickly from the rebound.

Players still made their first shortcut to the right, as going left on the initial turn back to the bridge is very difficult. In the mid-2000s, players continued to subtract fractions of a second from the record as the time dropped to 26 and eventually began to go left. on the first lap to save extra time even though it was harder, as evidenced by VA Jay's twenty-six point oh eight in 2007, but then over the next few years an incredible world record battle developed between Greg I and V AJ. Very little video of their records are available online, but we know quite a bit about their strategies to set a new record at this point, extremely precise paths had to be used, the blue and red lines represent the two paths players can take to do so. the shortcut, the blue one is called the wide path, while the red one is the forward path, the wide path allowed you to go out of bounds before crossing the finish line, but lakitu made you go further back on the bridge, the path towards ahead involved you cutting the corner of the track. to reach the snow and forces you to drive past the finish line to keep the bug working, but you respawn in front of the bridge.

You can see the difference on the map and where you had to leave a balance for each one. The path and the differences in where you respond, respawning later makes it harder to quickly get back into the snow and how the trick still works, so the optimal way to do it is to take the wide blue path for the first two turns to turn easily. snow and get out early, then take the red road forward for the last lap to get a little closer to the finish line, of course this wasn't entirely clear when these two guys were fighting, so Greg ended up making three paths forward. in his attempts, while va-jay-jay correctly did two wides and then a... forward at the end, although it wouldn't matter, these guys would end up getting exactly the same time of 25.8 six and twenty-two on the record world id that was maintained.

For six years in 2018, it was the oldest world record in the game, but that year Abney used research to his advantage to beat it by jumping before making a turn a/b increases the speed at which you turn, so Abney jumps before the a/b turn. On the first lap bridge, he also held the a/b turn until he used the mushroom and was in the snow, which saved him a small amount of time. Furthermore, these strategies developed by the Tainha climate were enough to help him defeat the elder. world record in the game by 1/10 of a second and has been the record ever since, we have passed three of the four categories and the last one is quite a challenge, it is over two minutes driving around the field perfectly as far as possible Over the years, this record has been perfected to the point that its driving must be essentially flawless.

Every job with corner cuts must be perfect down to hundredths of a second. It is the absolute test of how well a player can drive. This is the no. three lap record on the circuit, the early

history

of the record saw back and forth exchanges between Penev and Peter II, they took turns lowering it from 204 to 201, even though Peter repeated in NTSC, he was able to outlast Penev and eventually break it beat in 2005 Eddie T was able to give us the first video of a three-lap record with no shortcuts, a 201 point one nine that played in NTSC.

His record had everything you'd expect: drifting around snowbanks while being careful to get it right. approaching them without touching them is to slow down and get the right angle on each turn. It is important to note where he used each of his three mushrooms, one on each turn, during the place where the third mushroom was used on the record flat that he cut to the right. over the snowbank and then jumped onto the trail. MJ was the first person to break the record under 201 by achieving two minutes nine and eight in March 2008, but in 2014 the scene would change once again and over the next few months records would change hands between two people again and again. like the flop album, they did it again here this is the battle between TS and Dan started when Dan got a time of two minutes and fifty-five hundredths of a second in November 2014 this was actually the first friend The world record that Dan had ever had.

The Matisse was not willing to be surpassed by a newcomer, so he lowered the record by six hundredths of a second on the same day Dan obtained the record from him. It took Dan a while, but in February 2015 he did it again. he defeated Matthias, but Matthias once again quickly dethroned Dan. This time he took a whole week. This pattern continued throughout 2015. Dan would beat Matthias, but then Matthias would come back on top a few days later. The main reason was the difference in how he handled the mushroom section. Matthias took great care in perfectly straightening his Curt to get straight back onto the track after jumping the hill while Dan struggled with this and couldn't fix the line of his Kart properly, he It literally cost only hundredths of a second, but when someone was beating you by such small amounts, eventually Dan couldn't keep up with Matthias, so Matthias kept lowering the record while Dan fell, but what these two players had done per frame was to reduce the time closer. to two minutes through better driving and optimizing the mushroom will jump to cut as much track as possible now Matthias had a new goal taking the time under two minutes was a time that people had considered impossible, including TS himself , but as he improved on the track he began to doubt himself if he could really last there this is a joke this is real two minutes to the day he was one hundredth of a second away months of trying had brought him to just one hundredth of a second from glory Matthias had set dozens and dozens of world records in Mario Kart 64 on all tracks, but he had never strived for a record like this before, just saying to take the point.

Oh, one of them, there are Olympic speed world records that are bettered by more than this. on a regular basis, but it turns out that taking hundredths of a second off the endless fraps would be a lot harder than anyone could have imagined, come on please, no, it can't be possible, this is a joke, yes, yes, by far pain. You feel it