[Epilepsy Warning] Choco Mountain: The History of Mario Kart 64's Most Infamous Track

[Music] this is choco mountain it's the third course 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 course with a white sky no crazy upside down or underwater driving like in the newer games the walls are practically right on top of you so you don't really have much room to navigate around the track but you see this course has a bit of a reputation there's a group of people who've been battling each other for the past couple of decades to finish the course in world record time what attracts these gamers to choco mountain in particular well probably the fact this course can be absolutely and completely broken [Music] let's start by taking a close look at the track itself choco mountain begins with a few quick turns toward the top of the course followed by a long 180 degree turn that puts you inside a tunnel during each of these turns it's optimal to do what's known as a mini turbo you press r to hop and start your turn to go into a drift with white smoke coming out of the bottom of your cart you then push the control stick in the opposite direction that the turn is and push it back again the smoke should turn yellow do the same thing with the control stick again and the smoke turns orange that means your mini turbo is complete and when you let go of r you'll get a slight speed boost it sounds like this will be a slow process but a skilled player can execute dozens of these mini turbos in a row around the course [Music] the entire start of choco mountain is fittingly a loop around a chocolate mountain as you can see from this overhead view after going through the tunnel you drive along a winding section with hills on both sides of you then you make another 180 degree turn around a pool of water with boulders falling from above then another right turn a few more bouncing hills and you're finished with the lap all right doesn't seem so crazy right that's probably what most people were thinking when this game was released in north america in february 1997 but it didn't take too long before people figured out that there was a lot more to this track 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 one another it was first documented in an email from a legendary mario kart 64 player david wan from april 19th 1997 [Music] the email provided the following instructions for performing the shortcut drive through choco mountain as normal until you come to the part where you can see the overpass on your left in the time trial mode you can see a guard rail to your left go to the part just before it starts going downhill and then turn 90 degrees to your left drive into the wall and press the r button to jump at about the moment you hit it and you will jump right over the wall this little technique became known as a wall jump practically anywhere in the game if you drive into a wall and press r to hop the instant before you hit the wall you will jump off of the wall and go much much higher mario kart 64 runs at about 30 frames per second on the ntsc version so in most situations you only have a 30th of a second to time a wall jump but since your card is traveling so fast sometimes it's not possible at all to time the wall jump the window you have the jump is actually smaller than the length that your cart travels in a frame if you're going top speed so sometimes your cart skips over that perfect position and hits the wall before you have a chance to jump this is known as the zero frame jump and when it happens your cart tumbles like this looking at the overhead view of choco mountain it's easy to see why this saves so much time the shortcut is performed here and you're jumping from the lower portion to the upper portion when the designers made this course they put both ends of the loop around the water right next to each other the idea was to put a guardrail on the upper portion so you wouldn't fall off onto the lower portion and put a wall next to the lower portion so you couldn't get up to the top but with the watchman being discovered that pretty much eliminated the wall barrier so as long as players were able to press the r button at the right time and didn't get zero framed they would be able to skip the long loop around the water with boulders falling and save a few seconds in 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 either of these times and i couldn't find a picture of them anywhere either still the times were particularly important because they set the groundwork for the two ways chocolate mountain could be played either non-shortcut where you drive around like normal or shortcut where you do the wall jump and over the next couple of months in 1997 there were reports that players lowered the shortcut times by realizing that you didn't need to actually stop to do the wall jump and can instead just drift into the wall like this a guy named kevin booth reportedly lowered the 3 lap world record down to a 128 and someone with the nickname abe apparently took it down to 122 and then came june 24th 1997. david wong would send out another email on this day and he was about to reveal to the world more about choco mountain if you thought the wall jump was crazy get ready david wan's about to completely destroy a choco mountain [Music] juan had already discovered one shortcut on chaco mountain the grey 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 lap go immediately to the left and jump scale the mountain rapidly jump with the r button while driving into the mountain if you do this in the right place 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 actually happening here the player's goal is to get from about this spot to about this spot normally if you try to hop up the side of any hill or mountain on the track you'll just tumble down when you get to the top but as you can see in this 2008 video from matthias rustemeier there's one polygon here at the top that you can just barely jump onto if you do it'll cause you to tumble down the other way skipping you across the whole loop shortcut number two just before you reach the big hill prior to the overpass area go directly into the wall on your left drive into it at full speed and jump as you hit it if you do this in the right place you will clear the wall and land in the same area as in the first shortcut this shortcut was more or less a faster version of the jump scaling shortcut you end up cutting out a little less of the track by the time you save from not having to jump your way up and down the wall more than makes up for it shortcut number three at the very beginning of the course just drive around one cart length forward from the start line and drive into the wall on your left with the aid of a mushroom jump with the r button as you hit it and you might land on top of the mountain if you do it properly blackity will pick you up and place you right at the tunnel this one might look the most crazy of all of them but in reality all that was happening was you got boosted up to right around the point where the track overlaps itself the game thinks you're right next to the tunnel so it puts you inside of it when you get set back down unfortunately juan also mentioned that he didn't believe the jerk was possible to do in the time trials mode since he'd only gotten it to work in the grand prix 150 cc mode your top speed is slightly faster in 150 cc than in time trials and since you needed to jump up so high the more speed you had the better well now the floodgates were open world records were available to any skilled player who wanted to get them david juan was once again the first to do so providing times of 23.81 for the fastest single lap and 114 52 for the fastest three laps of choco mountain the jump scaling shortcut ended up being pretty useless for his purposes since it was slower and more difficult than the hill jump the huge wall jump shortcut at the start didn't help him much either since world records were done in time trials instead of 150cc but this hill jump was huge it saved about 5 seconds per lap over the grey wall jump and it wasn't incredibly difficult just time to jump correctly and hope you didn't get zero framed that's where the 5 second time save came from over juan's old single lap record and how he was able to cut off so much time over the three lap world record his strategy was to do a hill jump and drive as well as he could for the fastest single lap and do a hill jump once each lap for the three lap record as time went on more skilled players came along to take the record lower but you must keep in mind the mentality of speedrunning was different back in the late 90s it operated more off of a system of trust and respect if you are a respected runner who can prove your skills through live appearances or some video tapes most reasonable times you submitted will be accepted even without much evidence a lot of world record runs didn't have video proof and weren't well documented other than old websites and yahoo groups posts so it's nearly impossible to decipher exactly who got world records when in mario kart 64 from back in the late 90s from what i could gather the world records for chocolate mountain traded hands a few times in late 1997 and early 1998. jason walls kevin booth jonathan bernier and possibly a few other people all took turns lowering the choco mountain shortcut records in 97-98 but a guy named alex penniv would end up changing the playing field up until this point nobody had held any choco mountain shortcut record for longer than a few months penev would end up holding the three lap choco mountain shortcut record for a total of four years and 10 months he would end up holding the one lap record for a total of more than six years penov is well known for having speed ran dozens of games at very high levels nearly every mario kart game other mario games and zelda just to name a few his first choco mountain record achieved was the one lap record on september 30th 1998. he would proceed to lower this record 12 times the only time he didn't have this record from then until december 2005 was a one year span from august 2001 through august 2002 when miller had the record pen have also realized that the tunnel work at the start was possible to do in time trials if you drift into the wall like this it saved around two seconds and using it he lowered the one lap time down to sub 20 seconds his reign over the three lap record was similar he first got in october 1998 and lowered it seven times the only time he didn't have this record from then until december 2005 was a two-year span from may 2000 to august 2002 when simmons had the world record now there's one very important distinction about alex penniv that i have to make he played on 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 meant that the power version only ran at 5 6 the speed of the ntsc version so not only would the game be played in slightly slower motion on pal but all times would be about 17 slower too in order to compensate for this the mario kart 64 community created the combined rank system which could accurately compare times from each version of the game a 30 second lap on pal for example would be equivalent to a 25 second lap on ntsc for simplicity's sake i'm just going to be referring to most pal times as their ntsc equivalent anyway penna was able to take the fastest lap time down about half a second to 21.58 seconds by his driving better and then to about 19 and a half seconds by using the tunnel jump he was cutting corners tighter having cleaner mini turbos all while doing a hill jump every time he would take the three lap time down to 107 32 by 2002 by doing the same thing in the first few months of mario kart 64's release four shortcuts were found on choco mountain over the next several years zero new shortcuts were found instead a few were theorized in the early 2000s miller theorized a trick where he would bounce off of the wall in the tunnel and trigger the next lap to start although he got 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 the trick it was very similar to the existing wall jump at the start of the track only instead of getting picked up by lakitu you would hold left as you jumped and completely clear over the wall and land on the track below once again however while this trick was attempted nobody is able to get it to work yes choco mountain was still an unsolved puzzle although some pieces of it were put together it was clear there was still a lot more to the track that hadn't yet been found but while they searched for more shortcuts they figured they might as well get some more world records as well [Music] over on the one lap side shadow of miles was able to get a 1768 lap in 2005 which was more than a second and a half faster than pendef's best time it was the same route of doing a tunnel jump at the start and then doing a hill jump but his hole jump was so clean that he landed safely on the track without needing to tumble down the other side this lap would end up standing for over four years for the three lap record carlo and miles took turns lowering it with the help of a tunnel jump and three hill jumps recorded runs were much more common at this point but as you can see from carlos videotapes they weren't always of the highest quality a camcorder recording of a vhs tape was sometimes the best we have well now we're moving on to the year 2007 and it's time to introduce you to one of my favorite speedrunners of all time you may not have heard of him before but you're definitely not going to forget him now this is vaj vaj began getting mario kart 64 world records in the mid-2000s and by 2007 he was working on choco mountain on may 8 of that year he got a new world record a 112 50 on pal equivalent to a one minute flat time for ntsc done by executing three hill jumps and two tunnel jumps like most he submitted this time to the choco mountain leaderboards on mariokart64.com but he was too hyped to do that right away instead he turned on his camcorder and filmed his reaction to the time first [Music] this is what i'm talking about muchacha world record let's do it again check it out [Music] as much of a character as vaj is he's also an incredibly good mario kart 64 player one of the best ever to play the game in fact this three lap time of his stood for nearly seven years and in the meantime he was busting out world record after world record on nearly every other track in the game one of those world records was for choco mountain one lap he lowered milo's four and a half year old world record in 2010 before being beaten by carlo and then he eventually took it down to a 1759 or 21-15 on pal in 2013. he didn't record a reaction video this time unfortunately but he did provide a video of the run itself no new strategies were used it was all just the tunnel jump in the hill jump once again but you can see how tightly he was cutting all of his turns he was trying to leave no margin of error for anybody to beat his time so now we're in 2014 vaj is in control of both choco mountain shortcut records and for the past decade the discovery of new strategies has been pretty dormant but remember back in 2005 greg posted about a theoretical shortcut where you would jump completely over the wall at the start and land on the track below for nine years it seemed to be no more than the theory and then in february 2014 greg posted this in the mario kart forums greg called out the possibility of this trick and nine years later he was the one to do it for the first time he hit the wall in the perfect spot held left and was able to completely clear the wall to land on the track below as you can see this trick would skip the whole loop at the start just like the old tunnel jump did but instead of having lakitu pick you up while the timer keeps ticking you simply land and keep driving the key to this trick was the setup instead of drifting into the wall and using a mushroom you had to perform what's known as a snag boost if you're holding b and use a mushroom while touching a wall the wall initially holds you back and drastically increases your speed when you release from the wall you'll fly forward at a really high speed so highest speed that when you jump off of the wall you'll be able to completely clear it and sleep getting picked up by lakitu this trick would be known as the gregg style named after its creator it saved around two seconds over the old tunnel jump and throughout february 2014 greg and zorin took turns lowering the one lap record until it came down to a 1588 held by greg now greg made his forum posted around 9 30 am on february 2nd 2014 mario kart 64 players from around the world immediately flocked to the thread to congratulate him on his find some were amazed by the find while others were getting ready to try for the world record however one person's reaction was different from everybody else's this guy whether or not commonly called weatherton in the mario kart 64 community weatherton is a mario kart 64 tasser someone who plays the game in an emulator with tools such as slowing everything down moving frame by frame and making save states to create a theoretically perfect run weatherton too was excited about this new discovery but he immediately had an idea to make it even better at 1 in the afternoon on february 2nd about 3 and a half hours after greg's original post weatherton said that 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 over here then get placed back behind the finish line by lakitu and finish the lap so he used his task abilities to try to get it to work the next day february 3rd at 7 30 in the evening he posted two discoveries one he wasn't able to land his trick and two he had just found a different trick probably the craziest trick in mario kart 64's history the weather tanko a six second lap how is it possible the answer lies in how the game handles checkpoints around the track we know from the old tunnel jump that if you get stuck at the top of the hill the game thinks you're in the tunnel and lakitu will drop you there for the weather tanko you need to hit a very precise place on the wall so your character will clip into the wall ever so slightly this too makes the game think that you're at the tunnel then once you drop back down as long as you're behind the finish line the game will think you're at the end of the lap so all you need to do is cross it a six second lap was miles ahead of what anyone dreamed could ever be possible but keep in mind this was a tool assisted speed run so it wasn't a world record but rather a proof of concept just because someone could prove that the trick was possible didn't mean a human could pull it off quite yet this trick had a lot of parts to it he needed to not get zero framed bounce high enough hit the exact right part of the wall and bounce far enough to the left to land behind the finish line some of the top ranked players around the world began trying to be the first human to hit the trick vaj who is ranked number one in the world for shortcuts greg who is ranked number two and other top tier players like miller and jones by july 2014 five months after the trick had been discovered still nobody had been able to land the weathertenko they came close getting all sorts of jumps near the top of the wall but it was just too precise for anybody to land at least until august 3rd that day someone posted that they had finally been able to pull off the weather tanko but it wasn't vaj or greg or any of the really highly ranked shortcut players it was the 29th ranked shortcut player a guy with the username abney317 [Music] 589 this beat the old single lap record by 10 seconds and as you can imagine people freaked out this was abney's first world record not just for choco mountain but in all of mario kart 64 speedrunning nobody was able to take it from him for a few months but that november the competition heated up again on november 5th 2014 patricio managed to take the record from abny with a 544 abney decided that he didn't feel like losing the weather tanko record so he did some attempts on the same day and beat patricio's time twice ultimately getting the record down to a 488 but guess who came back the very next day to break apne's record check this out i beat the stars yo 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 on the first lap i was like you know what let's try second lap and then i hit it i went over the finish i just pressed press this room i jumped and now i hit it i was like [Music] it out everyday i got you man if you just bet y'all check this out yo vaj would hold on to this record of 3.26 for a few months but abny would end up tying and eventually beating his time in the early months of 2015. abny would continue lowering the one lap record closer and closer to three seconds flat over the next few years the three lap record however 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 get as many hill jumps or tunnel jumps as possible to get a world record the weather tank will completely change the playing field you're given three mushrooms to work with in time trials so you could potentially hit three weather tankos one on each lap and be done with the whole race super quickly in under 20 seconds possibly so by late 2014 the question had to be asked how many weather tankers could somebody hit in a single race for a while the answer was just one abney got a couple of three lap records that were under a minute shortly after he pulled off the first weather tanko in november 2014 these were both done by executing one weather tanker at the start and then trying to land as many hill jumps as possible after on january 16th 2015 abny once again made history he became the first person to pull off two weather tankos in the same run this pushed the 3 lap record down to 44 seconds and that's where it stood for more than a year was hitting three out of three weather tankers possible i mean sure theoretically it was but abny's odds and hitting a weather tank on any given attempt were only about one in forty he needed to hit three of these in a row so that put the odds at about 1 in 64 000 that an attempt would be able to hit three weather tankos in the summer of 2017 abney made a decision he was going to try to get a three out of three weather tanko run and nothing was going to stop him he was going to start hit a weather tanko immediately set up and hit another one and then immediately set up and hit a third one back to back to back and i know what a lot of you are probably thinking right now why was abney bothering to do this he was literally booting up his stream just to drive into a wall over and over again for a few hours you'd think that it would be incredibly boring to watch him do these attempt sessions but that wasn't at all the case he streamed all of his attempts on twitch and the chat there was filled with hundreds of people anxiously awaiting the one run that would be the one they watched him as his attempt counter climbed higher and higher first passed ten thousand attempts and then passed twenty thousand most people wouldn't have had the patience to do these attempts nearly every day for weeks but abny knew chocolate mountain was at its breaking point [Music] not even a jump dude he had almost killed the most infamous track in the game all i needed was one attempt oh god dude we got two out three that like i already get the two up one perfect attempt that would grant him the title of one of the most legendary speedrun world records ever [Music] now [Music] yes let's go let's go that's it yes let's go [Music] 26 461 attempts later abny had accomplished what was thought to be impossible choco mountain had been all but destroyed all the years of figuring out shortcut after shortcut taking world record after world record had finally culminated in a three out of three weather tanko as of the time i'm making this video nobody's replicated this feat and i can't imagine what somebody would have to go to to lower the three-lap record anymore the one lap record on the other hand was recently taken below 3 seconds by a guy named frankie yes abney's tied this time a couple of days later and has been trying to push it lower ever since in total 13 people have been able to pull off a weather tanko with 11 of them doing it in the time trials mode the fastest time coming from the aforementioned world record and the slowest time coming from theodore fifth nine [Music] another couple of quick things i have to mention this game was released in japan before it was released anywhere else in the world so japanese players had their records before anybody else did and it's possible they may have had faster times than the rest of the world for a while however it's not really documented anywhere online so it's impossible to add them into the timeline and of course there's a whole different side the choco mountain the non-shortcut side which is currently dominated by mathias rustemeier no wall jumps hill jumps or weather tankers allowed just perfect driving around the course matisse is definitely one of the best people to ever play mario kart 64. maybe the best ever the next time you're playing mario kart 64 try playing choco mountain see if you could hop over any walls or skip over any parts of the track maybe you'll be the next david juan and discover new shortcuts or the next apne and you're gonna defy the odds to hit three weather tacos in a row again whatever it may be you can be sure that you've done it on the most infamous track in the game thanks for watching [Music] if you like watching speedruns be sure to follow me at my twitch channel twitch.tv summoningsalt thanks

Channel: Summoning Salt

Views: 4,133,907

Rating: 4.9323077 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: Y99Wj-NStok

Length: 29min 54sec (1794 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 03 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/carypalmer]

I feel giddy when I see the notification on YouTube. Every video is as good as the last. You are, truly, a massive contribution to this community.

[u/alexpenev]

Even I learned a couple of new tidbits from this. :O Awesome research.

[u/mrw412]

His use of music in this video is so amazing, keep up the amazing work Summoning Salt!

[u/Swarfega]

Oh man I love his videos. Saving this one for later when I'm on my PC rather than my phone. Thanks for the heads-up OP.

[u/[deleted]]

God damn, that's cool. I love how he just brute forced it, that's some perseverance.

It's really cool how these videos span decades. It started in 1997 and ended on Saturday, and records are still being set. Insane.

[u/axeil55]

Yet another excellent video. I never knew a seemingly boring track could be so exciting.

[u/MyLittleWaIrus]

For anyone unaware, VAJ actually made a rap song parody dedicated to Choco Mountain speedruns and it's amazing.

And speaking of VAJ, check out this link for all your VAJ-related needs.

[u/selflessscoundrel]

Great video. Good use of music. Great set up showing us failed attempts as well as the final run. Really shows the dedication of the community. A pleasure to watch. Thanks.

[u/pinkycatcher]

Did I just spend 30 minutes watching a video about a 16 second speedrun? Yup.