This week we take a pre-rendered trip back to 1997 to play Mario Kart 64!

Super Mario Kart on the SNES introduced us to the Mario Kart concept and is unique compared to other titles in the series thanks to its controls and mode-7 graphics but Mario Kart 64 is the first ‘modern’ Mario Kart title, introducing controls and characters that would continue into 2016.

Indeed, whilst Super Mario Kart sold well, Mario Kart 64 is undoubtedly the title that garnered mainstream success for the series and become not just an N64 classic but an iconic 90’s past time. Mario Kart 64 had groups of people crowding around the TV screen throwing green shells at one another, sliding through DK Jungle, crashing into lorries on highways and screaming in pain much like Toad. It was a multiplayer revolution like one we’d never seen and ushered in a new era of multiplayer gaming as we went from 2-player mode-7 racing to 4-player 3D kart racing mayhem.

Gameplay

Bursting onto the 3D scene, Mario Kart 64 set the standard for the control-scheme and kind of levels to expect in later entries. Using the analogue stick to guide yourself around the track, you’ll be gliding past shells and bananas, using the R button to slide and Z to lay an item. The introduction of 3D graphics also meant that the environments and terrain could get a whole lot crazier and courses had you going up hills, falling down cliffs, sliding past pools of water and boosting over jumps, all whilst trying to pummel your friend in first place with an evil blue shell.

Mario Kart 64 not only pushed the levels into over-drive but went crazy with the items too. Shooting a green shell wasn’t a hit or miss situation because if you missed the player in front the shell would continue on anyway, bouncing off walls all over the level until finally finding someone to destroy. Red shells follow the person in-front relentlessly until certain death and we were introduced to one of man’s most feared weapons – The Blue Shell, blasting its way past every racer before ending in a massive explosion for the person in first.

Mario Kart 64 was all about opening the entry level with items such as the blue shell, ensuring that you could have competitive races with hardcore Mario Kart players but beginners would also stand a chance thanks to the weapons algorithm being more favourable to those in 4th place or lower, dishing out 6 bananas, 3 spinning green shells or the deadly blue shell to help them keep in the game.

Courses
Mario Kart 64 offers 16 tracks and most of them are firm favourites. Royal Raceway, DK Jungle and Rainbow Road are all classic tracks that are regarded as some of the best in the entire series, so it’s impressive that so many made their debut in this N64 title. Rainbow Road was especially unique in this edition thanks to its length, no Mario Kart track before or since is quite as long as this N64 race in the sky and it made for some hilarious and intense races in my younger years, especially with those pesky Chain Chomp gliding up and down the road.

Battle Mode
Battle mode gives each player three balloons and drops them in an arena for a battle to the bitter end. You’ll lose a balloon if you slip on a banana or get hit by a shell so from the moment the battle begins, racers will be zooming off to grab some item boxes and go on the offensive.
There’s a few levels on offer in battle mode and all are quite fun but nothing quite compares to Block Fort, a level so loved that every Nintendo gamer knows of its beauty. Block Fort is composed of 4 different coloured blocks with two floors, joined together by bridges with a road underneath that you can use to drive to each one.

Back when I played Mario Kart 64 as a kid, we used to each claim a block as our own and give ourselves five or ten minutes to protect it, this resulted in ten minutes of feverishly getting item boxes hoping for bananas and laying the skins at the entrance of the fort and before every bridge. If you got a star or red shell you had to waste it and if you got a green shell you had to shoot it off the edge.

After those ten minutes our forts would hopefully be fully protected with bananas and not only that, the green shell rule meant that the road below was a complete death trap with masses of green shells bouncing off every wall – If anyone were to try and drive to another fort on the road below they were bound to be hit by at least one shell.

When the ten minutes were up, each of us had to try and infiltrate and take over another fort one at a time. I’m not sure how these rules came to be, I think they just formed naturally over the years as these things do, but it resulted in some of the most fun and hilarious multiplayer matches I’ve played on any title, and some matches were so intense they’d last an hour or more.

Even if you died fairly early on you could still have fun, as you’d return as a bomb on wheels, ready to go and get revenge on those that wronged you. We got so obsessed with Block Fort at one point that we forgot there were any other maps, let alone actual races to be had. Block Fort is such a simple design but one that works so well, and I beg for its inclusion in every new Mario Kart release.

Newer titles have put a spin on the three-balloon formula but nothing beats the simplicity of Mario Kart 64’s battle mode.

Stand-out Moments
- Rainbow Road
Rainbow Road in Mario Kart 64 was awesome with its super catchy music, neon lights, blinding floor and insane drop at the start but there’s something very interesting about that initial drop. When you press the R button to slide, you’ll initially do a little jump, if you jump just as you go down the big slope at the start of Rainbow Road and veer left you can jump off the side of the track, gliding through space before landing on the road below, knocking off a huge chunk of the level. When I discovered this it gave me a huge advantage, and also resulted in mass bitterness from my friends, but eventually we all learnt the shortcut and spent the first minute of Rainbow Road dying over and over again trying to make our way over to the road below.

- Peach’s Castle
Finding Peach’s Castle was a truly awesome moment. As you’re driving through Royal Raceway you can see Peach’s Castle in the distance but surprisingly there’s a narrow road that you can follow which will lead right up to it – you’ll no doubt lose the race if you do this but it’s awesome to check out all the same. Lifted straight from Super Mario 64, you can drive all around the outside of the castle, right up to the front door.

Mario Kart 64 was set to be a launch title alongside Super Mario 64 but got delayed by six months as people were taken off the Mario Kart team to help finish off Super Mario 64 before its release. Their projected release date and the fact some of the same people were involved in both titles is likely what lead to Peach’s Castle making such a profound appearance in Royal Raceway.

Graphics and Music
The tunes in this title have that Mario magic; they’re catchy, upbeat and will stay with you for a life-time, the sound quality isn’t the best though and has that typical N64 synth sound. The same applies to the graphics, they’re not bad but pale compared to other titles of this era such as Diddy Kong Racing. Of all the things in this title though, the racers themselves are what have aged the worst.

To combat having 8 players on screen, characters in this title are pre-rendered sprites, which looked fine back in the 90’s on a 14-inch SD TV but look absolutely hideous on modern HD TV screens – at times it looks like you’re playing ‘Paper Mario Kart’ as the racers stick out like a sore thumb.

Final Cup
How does Mario Kart 64 hold up now? The single player hasn’t aged well, especially compared to modern Mario Kart titles. We’ve been spoiled in this last decade with 32 tracks and online as standard, so to go back to 16 tracks, no online and little in the way of extras, it feels a bit bare bones, not to mention the cheating AI and lack of unlockables. As a multiplayer title though, this game is fantastic.

The gameplay and controls are as fun as they ever were and if you manage to get a group of four people together, this game is as exciting, annoying, infuriating and hilarious as it was all those years ago. It’s available on the Wii and Wii U Virtual Console, and is still fairly cheap and easy to get hold of on the Nintendo 64, so it’s probably about time you squeezed a cup out of our poor Cheep Cheep again, he’s getting bloated.

More from Throwback Thursday:
- Mario Kart: Double Dash!!
- Diddy Kong Racing