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

[Music] Mario Kart 64 has a reputation of being pretty broken it's one of the most fun games on the Nintendo 64 for sure but its courses have been abused and exploited much more than the average racing game we've already seen this on chocolate molten but it turns out and that's not the only course that speedrunners have destroyed fraps Nolan has become infamous for its exploits over the years its world record is coveted with racers battling for the fastest time both with and without shortcuts so today let's take a look at how those world records have been lowered let's take a look at the most broken track in the most broken Mario Kart game [Music] [Music] the first thing to understand about Mario Kart 64 speedruns are the different categories to complete a time trial of a track you have to drive around it three times however speedrunners 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 trying for a three lap record where they drive around the whole course three times or a flap record short for fast lap where they just do the one lap and within each of those categories are two more categories shortcut and non shortcut a shortcut in Mario Kart 64 is generally 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 isn't a shortcut but launching yourself with Yoshi far off to the left so lakitu gets confused and places you diagonally backwards at the finish line to skip a lap is considered a shortcut yes that is a real shortcut in this game so those are the four categories of fraps no LAN time trials shortcut three lap non shortcut three left shortcut flap and non shortcut flap we're gonna start with the non shortcut flap the goal here simply drive one lap around fraps in the land as fast as possible the early history of World Records in Mario Kart 64 isn't easy to show off mainly because there's not video for a lot of them fortunately the website MK wrs comm has compiled a list of world records over time so we know what the record probably was but back then the proof needed to claim world record was different it was difficult to post videos on the internet so people would post their times in old yahoo group posts or simply through emailing others it operated off a system of trust and respect sooo if you were a respected member of your community your times would usually be respected too anyway the fraps Knowland non shortcut flap record was lowered down by a few seconds by a handful of American and Canadian players but then a guy named Pen f just destroyed the record see the NTSC version which came out in North America and a few other places runs at 30 frames per second while the PAL version runs at 25 frames per second so the PAL version is essentially running in slow-motion being played at about 5/6 the speed of the NTSC version this meant that an equivalent time between NTSC and PAL would be about 17% slower on Powell so to compensate for this the combined leaderboard system was made which balanced times between ntsc and pal so regardless of the version you played on your time would be on the same leaderboard whatever time you submitted it will be submitted with two times an NTSC time and a pal time that was 17% slower playing on PAL is generally regarded as being a bit easier since you're playing in slightly slow motion so for simplicity sake I'll be referring to all times as their PAL equivalent by the turn of the century the Powell team had gotten down to 39 seconds before Mike s at the first 38 second time by the early to mid 2000s the first videos of World Records began to pop up some of these videos weren't recorded in 4k quality so we'll take a look at this one by Carlo from 2006 38.7 won a world record by 0.02 seconds [Music] there's a few things to pay attention to here firstly the mini turbos whenever Carlo turned he was usually doing that's known as a mini turbo by drifting with the R button the player can then wiggle the thumbstick back and forth two times and the smoke underneath will change from white to yellow to orange once it's orange the player can release the drifts and their character will get a slight speed boost ideally the player will do this over and over to get as many speed boosts as possible Carlo played his toad since he Yoshi and Peach are tied for being the fastest character in the game the course itself is rather simple you can see from this overhead view that it's just a loop surrounded by snow going too far out into the snow causes you to go out of balance if you picked up at lakitu but you can go into it a little bit while still staying in bounds although your Kart does slow down so carlo uses three mushrooms and strategic places over the snow to cut off corners of the track the first was at the very start of the lap while the second and third were over these small hills of snow Carlos record only stood for two days before being beaten by a legendary run for a player known as MJ a thirty eight point six eight which stood for an incredible six and a half years that run was eventually topped by Zoran who was then beaten 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 bit more subdued yeah [ __ ] since VA Jays record in 2012 15 new records have been set all of which came from just two players Mateus rusty Meyer or mr and dan burbank matthias had the world record in early 2014 with a thirty eight point six zero but Dan saw potential to take it lower mainly based upon the hill they used the second mushroom on Matthias was taking this hill with a more aggressive jump than players in the past cutting the corner more and saving him time Dan worked hard to perfect this by jumping far left in the air and cutting back right to land closer to the track he also began to do a mini turbo slightly sooner after this he'll drunk than Matthias stood in both these situations were talking about tiny amounts of time save just a few hundredths of a second but in a run this precise every frame counts these two players traded the record back and forth for a few months as the time went down from the 38 60s to the 38 50s and eventually to the 38 40s you might think that since the game runs at 25 or 30 frames per second the players can only gain time in increments of about 0.04 but the game has a precise message for determining when you finish it determines how much of your cart is over the finish line when ending a lap giving you a different hundredth of a second based upon that so it was actually possible to improve by just 0.01 most of Dan's record to this point were actually played on NTSC rather than Powell but Dan switched to playing on Powell early 2015 and once he did he set four World Records in a row but Matthias eventually began changing a second shroom jump to be more like Dan's once he did he got a world record of 38 point 2 9 into this day Dan hasn't been able to beat that time he's gotten so so close getting his lowest thirty-eight point three zero but Matthias his record is now stood for over four years so that's it for the non shortcut flop record it's time to talk about some shortcuts this is the history of this shortcut flop record welcome to 1997 [Music] surely after the game came out a guy named David Juan began posting about shortcut discoveries he was finding and one of the craziest ones he discovered was from May 1997 on fraps in the land by going backwards at the start to the bridge then driving off of it directly onto the snow passing the finish line that extends outwards to start the lap then going out of bounds the game thinks here at the end of the lap when lakitu sets you down all you have to do then is drive forward and you've finished a lot this trick works because of Mario Kart 64 strange way of keeping track of where you are there are 646 markers around the track that the game needs to determine where your Kart is if you're within 20 markers of the finish line the game knows you're close so it'll add a lap if you cross the finish lines and subtract one if you cross it the other way the cutoff point for the 20 Ammar kurz is right in front of the bridge so if you go on to the snow there and go out of balance just past the finish line the game last has your location as set more than 20 markers away so it doesn't subtract the lap one lakitu brings you back across the finish line and you're 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 from a player named miles from 1999 shows off what was found to be the fastest method this is one of Mario Kart 64 s oldest known world records with the video miles went to the end of a lap and then hopped off the bridge onto the snow and positioned himself right before the end of the lap and on the very edge of what's considered still it bounced by then driving forward slightly the lap ended and he was immediately out of bounds and picked up by lakitu upon being placed down a well-timed mushroom and drift was all that was needed this time of 5.40 or 6.49 on powell was essentially the lowest this time could go and a few players tied it over the following years but then in 2004 miles discovered a new way of lowering the shortcut record this version didn't involve the bridge but it did involve the area right behind the finish probably one of the most broken regions of any track in any racing game it has to do with this polygon off to the left of the finish line it kind of has the same property as the bridge where if you land there the game doesn't subtract a lap upon getting place down so the player had to cross the finish line then find a way to hook back left to get to the polygon problem is the player would normally be marked as out of balance before getting there but hey this is Mario Kart 64 so of course there's a way around that this time it's thanks to a trick called the lakitu effect after setting you down wackadoo has a brief period of time where you can't pick you up again even if you go out of balance so the player could get to the end of a lap drive out of balance get picked up I like it to get set down then immediately spin left and use a mushroom hit off the hill to get air barely cross the finish line then hook back left onto the polygon before lakitu is finally able to stop you and pick you up when lakitu places you down you're much closer to the finish than on the bridge method so you can finish the lap about a half second faster once again players traded off the record over the next few years eventually getting it down to a four point nine zero ntsc time where it stood is a three-way tie between Greg I miles and V AJ but then on September 6th 2014 miles sat down to record a tutorial video on how to do the shortcut and while he was explaining how to do it this happened [Music] did you see that he accidentally beat the world record by a hundredth of a second legendary stuff this time was equivalent to a five-point 88 on Powell a couple years later this strategy would once again be improved this time by a guy named Marcos by initially going out of balance slightly closer to the finish line he'd be placed down by lakitu a bit farther forward you could then do a slightly different version of the shortcut by getting a big bounce off the base of the hill landing a bit closer on the polygon and ultimately getting picked up by latitude just a bit sooner being placed close to the finish line once again it saves just a tiny bit of time over the old shortcut but it was quite a bit harder Marcos took the record down to five point seven seven in July 2016 which is where the record stood for over three years but by the middle of 2019 a player known as Abney three-one-seven was getting close to it with a 5.8 3 he was grinding attempts live on his twitch stream to beat it but it was just an incredibly hard strategy to pull off hours of attempts went into trying to pull off a five-second lap oh he had done most of the shortcut correctly but his bounce was strange it went forward and said to the left hence his exasperated reaction he wasn't on the correct polygon and the trip wouldn't work right turn [Music] well he sure thought it wouldn't work and by all estimations this attempt shouldn't have worked but instead he beat Marco supply a full tenth of a second it turns out he is understanding of how the trick worked which I mentioned a couple of minutes ago wasn't accurate he didn't have to land on that one highlighted polygon it turns out with a bit of preparation landing in any of these polygons would work Abney had crossed the finish line so the game thought he was on the next lap he bounced over the hill and crossed on top of these polygons which since he got to the end of a lap by doing the bridge shortcut are mapped to give you a position of more than twenty markers behind the finish line he then moves slightly to the left while facing to the right crossing back over the finish line but since the game thought he was behind marker 20 he didn't subtract a lap so he was at the end of the lap despite not being as far left as normal and when he got picked up he simply drove forward to finish it he had taken a more direct path to the polygons instead of going for a left saving him the time over Marcos's world record fraps Nolan's shortcut flap record is crazy but perhaps the only strategy crazier than that he's driving three of those laps with crazy precision needed to snag a world record welcome to the three lap shortcut record it looks like this [Music] the three left shortcut strategy is extremely technical and it revolves around using the bridge shortcut right after the race begins you turn around to go on the bridge by holding a and V to spin keep spinning with a B and go on to the snow then go out-of-bounds where you need to upon beating put down on the bridge the player a B spins again to get to the snow and then this is repeated so the player can simply drive forward to finish the left for the first several years after the shortcut was developed in 1997 it was the usual suspects taking the record down Penna have had a dominant streak in the late 90s taking the record down to a 26 second Powell time in 2002 then M went off street to his own setting five records in a row but none of these old records seem to have surviving videos today but in 2003 this strategy for the course changed a little bit whether ttyn figured out that it was actually slightly faster to go to the left thing got a bounce and set it to the right so starting in 2003 when players were set down on the bridge they would quickly do an a/b spin and then turn left then mushroom out of Bounce players still did their first shortcut to the right since going left on the initial spin back to the bridge is very difficult in the mid-2000s players continued to take fractions of a second off the record as the time crept down to a lower 26 eventually they began to go left on the first lap to to save the extra time even though it was harder as evidenced by VA Jay's twenty six point oh eight from 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 around online but we do 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 could take to do 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 sooner after crossing the finish line but lakitu set you back further on the bridge the forward path involved you cutting the corner of the track to get to the snow and it forces you to drive further past the finish line for the glitch to still work but you respawn in front of the bridge you can see from the map the difference is and where you had to go out a balance for each path and the differences in where you respond respawning farther forward makes it harder to quickly get back to the snow and how the trick still work so the optimal way to do it is to take the blue wide path for the first two laps to easily spin to the snow and go out about sooner then take the red forward path for the last lap so you spawn a bit closer to the finish line of course this wasn't entirely clear back when these two guys were battling so greg ended up doing three forward paths in his attempts while va-jay-jay correctly did two wides and then a-- forward in the end though it wouldn't matter these guys would end up getting the exact same time of 25.8 six and twenty twelve at id world record that stood for six years by 2018 it was the oldest world record in the game but that year Abney use research to his advantage to beat it hopping before doing an a/b spin increases the speed at which you turn so Abney hops before the a/b spin on the bridge on lap one he also held the a/b spin until after he had used the mushroom and was in the snow which saved a small amount of time as well these strats both developed by weather tainha were enough to help him beat the oldest world record in the game by 1/10 of a second and it's been the record ever since well we've made it through three of the four categories and the last one is quite the challenge it's two plus minutes of driving around the course as perfectly as possible over the years this record has been refined to where your driving needs to be essentially flawless every work with corner cuts needs to be perfect down to the hundredths of a second it's the absolute test of how well a player can drive this is the non circuit three lap record the early history of the record saw being traded back and forth between Penev and Peter II they took turns taking it down from 204 all the way to 201 despite the fact that Peter replayed on NTSC he was able to outlast Penev and ultimately beat him by 2005 Eddie T was able to provide us with the first video of a three lap non short cut record a 201 point one nine that was played on NTSC his record had everything you would expected it tight drifting around snow banks being careful to get close to them without touching them is slowing down and getting the right angle around every turn it's important to note where he used each of his three mushrooms used one on each lap during the spot that the third mushroom was used in the flat record he cut right over the snowbank then hopped down to the track MJ was the first person to take the record under 201 getting two minutes point nine eight in March 2008 but in 2014 the scene would once again shift and over the following several months records would trade hands between two people over and over just like for the flop record they did it again here this is the battle between the TS and Dan it started when Dan got a time of two minutes and fifty five hundredths of a second in November 2014 this was actually the first pal world record Dan had ever held the matisse wasn't about to be beaten by a newcomer so he lowered the record by six hundredths of a second on the same day that Dan got his record it took Dan a while but in February 2015 he once again beat Matthias but Matthias once again quickly dethroned Dan it took him an entire week this time this pattern continued throughout 2015 dan would beat Matthias but then Matthias would be back on top a few days later the biggest reason why was because of the difference in how they handled the mushroom section Matthias was very careful to straightened out his Curt perfectly to directly head back to the track after hopping over the hill while Dan struggled with this and couldn't fix the line of his Kart correctly it cost him literally just hundredths of a second but when someone was beating you by that small in amounts it mattered eventually dan couldn't keep up with Matthias so Matthias kept pushing the record down while Dan fell off but what these two players had done frame by frame was take the time down closer to two minutes through better driving and optimizing the shroom he'll jump to cut as much of the track as possible now Matthias had a new goal take the time below two minutes it was a time people had deemed to be impossible including the TS himself but as he got better at the track he started to doubt himself could he actually take it there [Music] this is a joke this is real two minutes flat [Music] he was a hundredth of a second away months of attempts had gotten him just a hundredth of a second away from glory Matthias had set dozens upon dozens of World Records in Mario Kart 64 across every track but never before had he grinded for a record like this he just said to take point oh one off there are Olympic speed world records that get improved by more than this on a regular basis but as it turns out to take one hundredths of a second off of fraps no end would be so much more difficult than anybody could have imagined come on please no can't be possible this is a joke [Music] yes yes so in pain you're sorry [Music] you

Channel: Summoning Salt

Views: 2,396,338

Keywords:

Id: KvET7oMUY9o

Length: 27min 2sec (1622 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 16 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/fireork12]

Two uploads in a week? We do not deserve this man.

[u/atomheartsmother]

Why does it feel like every track is "Mario Kart 64's most broken track"

[u/OppositeExplanation]

You might think that since the game runs at 25 or 30 frames per second, the players can only gain time in increments of about 0.04. But the game has a precise method for determining when you finish.

No frame rule analogy this time :(

[u/jayhankedlyon]

lolol, came out of curiosity to see if this was already uploaded, there should be a "Post Summoning Salt Video%" category on this subreddit.

[u/cameronbrady]

holy shit salt is blessing us this month

[u/Person_Impersonator]

WHAT AN ENDING!

[u/DisgruntledPorcupine]

I was shocked as hell to see this notification. Two videos in a week!

[u/D_Winds]

I cannot tolerate this much goodness. I must save it for a New Year Present.

[u/jeffro422]

I can't believe it. Two beautiful videos in one week. We're not worthy!