The History of Rainbow Road World Records

[Music] you [Music] if you've ever played a mario kart game before the one course that probably sticks out in your mind is Rainbow Road its first iteration was in Super Mario Kart back in 1992 it was drastically different from all other courses in the game there were no walls very few obstacles and any false move would send you falling off the track this courses difficulty became a natural attraction for speedrunners whose goal it was to race through the track as fast as possible and throughout the Mario Kart games all of which feature their own version of Rainbow Road this courses legacy is still preserved let's take a look at how speedrunners have been able to break this course to set world records let's see just how good people can get at racing through Rainbow Road [Music] [Music] the story begins in 1992 this was the year that introduced the franchises staple course Rainbow Road from Nintendo Super Mario Kart the game had two different methods of racing grand prix where he risked against other drivers and time trials were he raced against herself to set the fastest time possible this video is going to be focused on world records achieved in the time trials mode the goal of time Charles was to race five laps around Rainbow Road as fast as possible and today the leaderboard is split up into NTSC and PAL world records the NTSC version of the game was released in North America and Japan while the PAL version was released in Europe and most other regions of the world the main difference between pal and NTSC is the frame rate NTSC is 60 frames per second while Palace 50 frames per second this lets the developers changing a lot of the code between the two versions resulting in race times that are a few seconds faster on the NTSC version the very early history of who could racer a rainbow road the fastest is extremely difficult to find given the difficulties of accessing the Internet in the early to mid 90s the overall world record was not particularly well kept track of the earliest agreed-upon records on rainbow road come from the late 90s and early 2000s with the NTSC record typically staying a couple seconds ahead of the PAL record while video proofs doesn't exist from any of these runs we still have a pretty good idea of what these records looked like they an all likelihood used either Bowser or Donkey Kong jr. as that racer since they have the highest top speed on the main road they probably took full advantage of hopping over corners a technique used to gain small amounts of time on each lap one technique that could not be used however was boosting by turning around a sufficiently large section of the track holding accelerate and pressing either left or right on the shoulder buttons the racer gains a small speed boost after completing the turn however Rainbow Road doesn't have any turns large enough to build a boost as you need to be turning for at least 74 frames or over a second in order boost to be built so driving around rainbow road simply consisted of cutting terms as tightly as possible and hopping over corners one of the most dominant runners at the early 2000s was Jamie White an NTSC player who in a 10-day span in January 2003 set nine World Records on rainbow road he didn't have any mind-blowing new strategies he was just extremely good at the game one of the best players Super Mario Kart had ever seen up to that point on the PAL side saw me was the first verifiable record holder while KVD and Gio traded the record back and forth throughout 2005 before Kart 7 snagged it right back before the new year then in 2006 a revolution was discovered across Super Mario Kart as a whole the backs of the d pads on super nintendo controllers have a bump that prevents two opposite directions from being pressed at the same time curt seven discovered that by opening the controller and shaving this bump down it was possible to get boosts much more easily by using a method called the zigzag boost the player could hop and wiggle from left to right on the controller even while going over a straight section of the course and begin to build up their boost without turning this combined with going over a long enough turn would mean boosts were now possible frequently throughout Rainbow Road saving a fraction of a second each time now the idea of modifying a controller to gain an advantage may sound controversial but this practice was more to standardize play than anything else Super Nintendo controller sometimes naturally shaped this bump down through heavy use alone so allowing people to do it themselves just made it fair to everyone there's still a leaderboard that doesn't allow these types of boosts the non NBT leaderboard but for simplicity sake we'll be focusing on runs where the boosting is allowed KVD would end up lowering both the pal and ntsc records down further using the zigzag boost and farther into the 126 range on pal and down to a 123 on ntsc other competitors would get a hold of these records for periods of time but kvd's mastery of the zig zag boost helped him continuously regain his title Japan also has their own leaderboards for the game and in June 2012 a player known as Marisa posted an NTSC time of 120 3.51 along with a video for proof this was more than the quarter of a second ahead of the NTSC record at the time and the way Marie said that it was by a just driving really well and B by utilizing a technique known as hot boosting normally players build a boost by zigzagging on the straight path before a corner since you can't normally build a boost while hopping over a corner it's sometimes necessary to spend a little extra time on the straight path to build up the boost causing the hop to be a little bit later and having it be a little bit less than optimal however Super Mario Kart has two hopping buttons l and r keep in mind one of these must be pressed the entire time you're building the boost for it to be build properly you press one of them to hop and then by switching to the other one the frame after you let go of the original one the game will allow your boost to keep building since you can now continue building your boost wall in the air the zigzag boost build can be stopped slightly sooner and you can get an optimal hop over the corners this extremely difficult technique is known as a hot boost and helped Maresa save a few frames over the course of the run this record is a bit controversial in the Western world mostly due to a lack of communication between Maresa and the West so far nobody has been able to beat it the closest any other NTSC player has gotten is a 123 point 6 3 by kV be achieved in January 2018 even 7 years after his time was achieved maurices record still reigns supreme by over a tenth of a second so that's the history of Super Mario karts rainbow road World Records but a few years after this game Nintendo released its first sequel it's legacy is preserved by its hundreds of active time trial players it has one of the most broken speedruns out there this is Mario Kart 64 [Music] Mario Kart 64 was the first game in the franchise to be in full 3d courses can now go up and down instead of just left the rate naturally this meant the developers could do a lot more with Rainbow Road on designing it the end result however was this this is Rainbow Road it's the longest course in the entire Mario Kart franchise in some respects it's the complete opposite of the Super Mario Kart iteration instead of having Millwall's there's a rail along both sides of the track all the way through to prevent you from falling off there's no flops ready to crush you but instead a few change shops that roam the track trying to hit you it's a bizarre course you're just surrounded by space while driving around a seemingly endless rainbow path there's no risk of falling off you just drive as well as you can however I mentioned before that Mario Kart 64 was a really broken game there are large skips on most of the tracks and as innocent as Rainbow Road may seem it too can be broken just the same one of the game's most famous shortcuts is from the very start of Rainbow Road you jump off the side of the track as it goes downhill and land far down on the track below this trick was discovered essentially right as the game came out and it's impossible to tell who the first person was to pull it off it cuts out a pretty significant portion of the track as you can see from the mini-map the best part is it's really easy to perform many could pull out their copy of Mario Kart 64 right now and probably get it on one of their first attempts after getting this jump it was up to the player to simply drive around the course as well as possible this involved doing mini turbos nearly constantly by hopping and holding our the drift then wiggling the thumbstick back and forth twice the player builds up a boost that can then be released to gain some speed it works quite similarly to boosting in Super Mario Kart except boosts can be built up much much faster in mario kart 64 also similarly to Super Mario Kart the game has both a Powell and an NTSC version the Powell version runs at five six the frame rate of the NTSC version what this means in mario kart 64 is that the game overall is slowed down on powell while the race timers kept at the same speed so an identical run will be about 17% slower on powell the mario kart 64 community actually puts pal and ntsc runs on the same leaderboard mathematically converting times between the two versions to tell which runs are faster although playing on pal gives a bit of an advantage since you're essentially playing in slow motion after the shortcut on rainbow road was discovered there began to be two types of runs through the course not shortcut runs where you drive around the entire thing as normal and shortcut runs where you would do as many shortcuts as you could to go as fast as possible the non shortcut record going by the PAL conversion on the leaderboard is a six-minute long journey around the course three times the record has only come down by about 10 seconds in the past 20 years and the only real strategy improvement was the discovery from David Tran at the very start by triple tapping the a button on the big hill the start of the course you'll be able to avoid becoming airborne and will go down it much faster other than that for a non shortcut all you were really doing was following a path around the course of driving and drifting of course this still took an enormous amount of skill to get just right for six full minutes in Australian runner named Alex Penev set 10 records in a row in non shortcut in the late 90s with players such as Sami and MJ trading it back and forth in the mid-2000s lately the non shortest side has been dominated by Abney three-one-seven and Matthias trust Meier these runners all use either toad Yoshi or peach since they're the fastest characters in the game on the shortcut side however the course has evolved a little bit more for the first couple years world records were set simply by jumping at the start of each lap then driving as well as possible around the rest of the course each of these jumps saved about a half minute so the record was down to about four and a half minutes by 1999 however that July a player named miles successfully executed a new method of the shortcut this spiral jump by doing a mini turbo then jumping as far to the left as possible over the railing it's possible to just barely make it over to the spiral on the left this saves another 10 seconds or so over the other jump but is much much harder Michael F became the first to hit three of these in a run in 2004 by using a more consistent but slightly slower method that involved braking before the jump over the rail their recent history of this record has been pretty amusing players Carlo and V AJ both held the record for a few years in the 2000 2010's then in early 2015 happening got the record with a 356 36 he got the spiral jump three times and drove really well all the way around it was a time that would stand for nearly three years and in November 2017 a player named Soren took it from him a 350 6.15 a three-year-old record beaten well later that same day Abney beat him back with the 3:50 6.07 Zoran wasn't about to let that set him back so he got back to grinding and remarkably a few days later he beat Abney again this time with a 350 6.02 it was an incredible feat firing right back at a guy who would hold the record for three years straight a feat that was only overshadowed by the fact that for the second time Abney beat him right back later the same day [Music] after this Abney will be beaten by Matthias Resta Mayer in late 2018 for a couple months but on New Year's Day 2019 he got the record back with a 350 4.87 and that's where the record stands today Mario Kart 64 is Rainbow Road has certainly had a storied history but now in 2001 Nintendo released their newest iteration of the track on their new gameboy advance this is Mario Kart Super circuit this game has probably received the least attention of all games in the Mario Kart franchise but as it turns out it can be broken just as much as any of the others to prove it let's take a look at Rainbow Road the track similar to Super Mario current version with no walls any ore on the track it seems like all you can do is drive around the course and follow the rules but that wouldn't be any fun Rainbow Road is surrounded by bumpers on each side that you can bounce off move by using a mushroom and going over them and then laying the gunman's to bounce again you can essentially just bounce around the course I mean look at the mini-map it looks like you're just going wherever you want as if the track is just a suggestion this concept of using the bumpers was first fully fleshed out by a player known as Yui in early 2002 just months after the game's release Joey was able to land on each bumper directly after flying in the air leading to him bouncing up again if he instead landed on the road his feet would be dramatically decreased so landing on the bumpers was pivotal of course the bumpers themselves are super narrow so landing exactly on them is no easy task but yo-yo was able to pull off a run of 30 6.45 flying around the track three times all of this precision is obviously extremely difficult and involved using a ton of small undetectable strategies that I'll explain later the record would come down a couple seconds over the following few years but in 2005 an incredible time was achieved a runner known as Mandor pulled off a thirty four point six three two thousand five coming up with a new strategy of skipping the section of boost near the end and instead going more directly towards the goal this strategy saves about a second across all three laps to give you an idea of how hard desert was to pull off we can take a look at a tutorial video for this route made by Super circuit speed runner ha-hey the player must aim just right for every jump let go and press a at precise times and even hold R to drift the certain points any slightly missed input means a strategy will fail and the player must restart now most of these strategies had to be performed regardless of whether Manders or yos route was used but Manders route did add in a tricky section where you had to hold a aim for precise part of the road launch off a bumper when drifting and then counter steer just before landing basically there is a world of precision that went into this Rainbow Road strategy getting all of it was incredibly difficult to pull off but still definitely possible Manders record is a bit controversial in the Western world mainly because he had used speed hacks in mario kart wii before what's more Mandor used toad in his run even though he's slower overall but he is easier to control if Mandarin you spouse or instead of toad his time would have been about three tenths of a second faster regardless Manders time caused the rest of the community to strive for absolute perfection it wasn't until 2010 when a player was finally able to beat him the runner was known as boomer and he beat Mandor by a tenth of a second by playing with Bowser his time would be tied five years later by ha-hey and then beaten by three hundredths of a second by a player known as shocked which is where the record sins today this incredibly difficult yet incredibly bold looking strategy who really makes it stand out bouncing all over the track definitely is fun but the execution needed to pull it off just right is super punishing to this day only six players have been able to get a time under 35 seconds on Rainbow Road and shocks record has stood for nearly two years it's estimated that the total time could probably come down by another 0.3 seconds or so based on tool assisted speedruns who's gonna be the person to take it under thirty four and a half seconds we'll just have to wait and see it's time to move on to the year 2003 it's the era of the GameCube and full 3d is back in the Mario Kart franchise this is Mario Kart Double Dash just as with the other games as soon as double-dash came out players around the world began competing for the fastest times on each course for Rainbow Road many of these early times don't have surviving videos today to find the first video we've got a go to November 2004 there we see a time of 256 point 6 1 6 by Stefan vidi the first thing to notice for this run is the character and Kart voice Stefan picked the lightweight koopa troopas his characters and the barrel train is his Kart this is because in Double Dash lightweight characters get a longer boost for mini turbos and the barrel train is fast both on and off the road double dashes Rainbow Road features several sharp turns that they didn't be made just right in order to avoid falling off drifting and charging up mini turbos around these corners is done similarly from in Mario Kart 64 pressing R to drift then wiggling the thumbstick back and forth you get a small boost after releasing Double Dash also has a technique known as our tech discovered by Rafa 64 in 2004 by letting go and pressing R during a drift your Kart can turn tighter than what's otherwise normal this is because the game automatically pulls your Kart in the direction of your turn when beginning a drift by pressing R over and over again and forgoing the mini turbo you fool the game into thinking you keep starting new drifts when reality your districted once so your Kart gets pulled a much tighter than normally would this helps Stefan get better turns around the hairpin and spiral trains saving time that added up over three laps over the following couple years the record would come down a couple more seconds partly due to another technique a tech releasing the accelerate button between mini turbos causes the Kart to sway less keeping a straighter path forward this can be done in strategic straight sections to save fractions of a second in 2007 Swedish runner andreas set a new record with the time of two 54.68 nine this runs video doesn't exist today but his previous record from two months before it does and it's what you're seeing on screen right now but there's something really really important about this run before Andres is run the world record had been verifiably broken 36 times on the other hand this run from Andreas stood for over eight years [Music] [Music] but before we get too excited here it's not entirely because the run was so perfect it was a great run but Mario Kart Double Dash didn't have a particularly active time trial scene in the years after Andres is run not many people were trying to set records even when people did do time trials they usually focus their attention on other tracks but regardless Andres has run stood on top for nearly a decade and then in 2015 Andre escaped back to the track he had dominated eight years before and repeated his performance on June 9th he beat his own record by less than three hundreds of a second a few weeks later Swedish rival Carlson beat Andreas and then an American player named Andrew beat him Andrew is one of the first record holders to play on the 60 Hertz or 60 framerate version of the game unlike Mario Kart 64 the 50 Hertz version didn't just slow down the gameplay it slowed everything down including the timer this meant there is no conversion necessary between 60 and 50 Hertz versions nowadays the 60 Hertz version of the game is strongly encouraged to play on since the now popular Grand Prix mode is played on 60 Hertz for timing reasons and Ria's record from 2015 stood all the way until May 2019 when Goomba beat it by about 1/10 of a second yes and that's where the world record stands today to recap the world record was beaten 36 times in the first four years of the game's release it would then be beaten just four times over the next 12 years this record is extremely solid but it's possible it could come down another second to the 253 range so that's all for Mario Kart Double Dash it's now on to the Year 2005 and it's time to go back to the handhelds this is mario kart DS [Music] probably the most notable mechanic in mario kart DS is sneaking mini turbos can be built up extremely quickly in this game by just holding our and rocking left and right twice on the d-pad doing this over and over means the player can build up boosts nearly constantly all the way around the track the result is some incredibly fast driving [Music] sneaking has been a staple of Mario Kart DS Tom Charles for years and it can be seen in the earliest Rainbow Road records with video evidence unfortunately the normal replay system for Mario Kart DS looks like this it's like they've tried to make it an action movie it's really hard to tell what strategies are being used and how well the race is being driven and since D s capture curbs were really hard to come by especially back then sharing Mario Kart DS replays in the first couple years the game's release wasn't easy but in early 2007 an action replay code was developed that let replays be seen from the same perspective that the racer originally saw action replays a device that you could plug into your system to modify how the game performs similarly to a game genie on the NES as long as the only code you use is the one to fix the replay system it's accepted in the Mario Kart DS community the first couple months of the game's release consisted of racers sneaking around Rainbow Road like all the other tracks but in 2006 a potential shortcut was found the player would make their way over to the spiral then get a boost from the zipper and jump just barely making it to the track ahead as you can see from a map of the course this shortcut cut out the need to drive around the rest of the spiral saving a few seconds the problem was if the shortcut was performed the game wouldn't count the lap upon crossing the finish line nobody was quite sure why it was theorized it had something to do with the checkpoint system around the track so for a while no shortcuts were performed on Rainbow Road but in late 2006 a runner known as husky 2 1:7 found something quite a bit harder than the first shortcut and this time the lap counted at the end this was the rail glitch [Music] by using a mushroom or a mini turbo and hopping at just the right angle the player can leave the surface of the course and land inside the rail of the tracks big loop the player then drives forward a bit and leaps off to the right side skipping the need to drive all the way around the loop if done correctly this saves about three seconds but it's incredibly difficult to line up your jump to perfectly land on top of the rail Husky was able to get a time of 157 using the rail glitch but then a player known as hado mugie beat him with a 156 a few months later had imoogi didn't use the rail glitch but instead use a trick theorized by edge a while before the pipe glitch by driving forward here to load the next checkpoint region then turning around and boosting off the track blackity will think you're further ahead than you really are and drop you before the corkscrew section as you can see by the mini-map after the time it takes to go out of bounds and be picked up by lakitu this trick saves about one second however it's much easier to do than the rail glitch over the following several months the record came down second by second with these two shortcuts the pipes workout was easy enough to do once per each of the three laps but the rail fur cut was only really done once per race due to how difficult it was the record had come down to a 151 by 2009 when a player known as Bjork posted a video of a 146 with three rail jumps however the run was suspected as being a tas and the video was later taken down today this run isn't counted as ever having been a world record on Mario Kart World Records calmed by 2011 runner MK - sure managed to get the time down to a 147 by doing three pipe shortcuts and two rail shortcuts this is where the record stood for about three years until the middle of 2014 when MK Dasher found something big remember the old shortcut from 2006 that didn't count the lap well eight years later MK - I found the way around that by driving forward a bit more the game loaded the next checkpoint for the track this was all the game needed to do to count the lap at the end so now m'kay - I could drive a bit farther forward and do this this shortcut eliminated the need to perform the rail glitch because you'd already wind up at the end of the loop it was also significantly easier and could be realistically performed on each of the three laps that combined with the pipes work on each lap meant times faster than ever before m'kay - sure set a record of 145 in May 2014 and over the next few years he traded it back and forth with players like Leone and Roopa the players current changed over time before the new shortcut the Robbie LS was used because of its slightly higher speed but after the egg one was used because of its better handling optimisation was found by doing the shortcuts quicker than before and cleaner driving overall in September 2017 m'kay - regatta 138 which is where the record stands today there's also another side to D s Rainbow Road speed runs nan shortcut runs in this category large shortcuts or shortcuts that involve going out of bounds are not allowed but corner cuts are still permitted the current non shortcut record is 154 by M K - er beating on 155 by Roopa that it stood for nearly six years that's all for mario kart DS 3 years after the game came out intend to release the next installment in the franchise it's one of the series most iconic games and it's well known for its unique ultra short cuts this is Mario Kart Wii [Music] Mario Kart Wiis Rainbow Road is notorious for being one of the hardest in the franchise with all of its tight turns and lack of walls it's incredibly easy to fall off the edge and be sent plummeting of course as with every other iteration of Rainbow Road some players were able to master it and world record time new to mario kart wii was an in-game online leaderboard system where the best time trials in the world could be automatically uploaded to time trial records can be seen instantaneously this way and can even be downloaded to race against so unlike many of the other games where early times were claimed online by veteran players even some of the earliest records of Mario Kart we have video proof including a two 37.3 a 0 by Yasuo his run was essentially just a speedy playthrough of the track but there's a few important things to pick up on his character was funky Kong the fastest in the game his vehicle choice was a bike called the flame runner in mario kart wii there's two main types of vehicles bikes and carts carts of the upside of giving the player a longer boost if they drift longer but bikes give the player the option to do wheelies during straight sections where the front wheel lifts up in the Blake moves faster there are also two subtly different types of bikes outside drifting ones and inside drifting ones bikes with outside drift throw the back wheel out more when turning so it takes longer to line the cart up forward after drifting bikes with inside drift are generally regarded as superior since he could do a wheelie much sooner after drifting so for nearly every course in the game an inside drifting bike is chosen and one of the best is the flame runner this was very quickly figured out when the game was released which is why Yasuo was using his bike and character combination over the following months the record would come down due to better driving and a couple of tricks like using a mushroom or a wheelie to hop over the first part of this s turn in late 2009 a player simply known as coal became the first to get a record with a freefall hop at the start by hopping when the track goes slightly up at the start it's possible to get enough air to completely clear the track below this saves time because the player is moving for in the x-direction the entire time as opposed to going down the hill where their speed is mostly going in the y-direction this trick would further be evolved by using a cart all of which have outside drift by drifting and hopping over the edge the cart will continue to rotate to the left when the vehicle hits the road hopping causes the game to push it away and give it speed this speed is enough to go over the zipper at an angle and cut the corner of the track since the cart without side drift is better on Rainbow Road than a bike with outside drift this makes Rainbow Road the only record in the game to be set with the cart over the following several years the record would come down by a fraction of a second at a time mainly just from optimizing the driving around the course some of the most notable record holders were japanese runners KK and Rooney o who set seven world records on Rainbow Road in 2011 and Katy who got the first time of 2:24 in February 2016 his time stood all the way until January 2019 when a player simply known as Bob beat it by four hundredths of a second there may not be many athletes left named Bob but there's at least one who's a rainbow road champion but the crazy part is the playing field will completely change if anybody is able to pull off the ultra shortcut [Music] because a mario kart wii strange checkpoint system and a few other mechanics many tracks have large shortcuts known as ultra shortcuts rainbow road's ultra shortcut was discovered in a tool-assisted speedrun by estilo a 62 in early 2016 the player must go forward in front of the railing at the start then turn back and hop along the small space between the railing in the edge of the track then the player uses a mushroom and as a spin drift drifting to the right by holding the stick back to the left then hopping off the edge of the track using the mushroom in the air before finally landing on the track below this trick requires an incredible amount of precision to pull off the spin drift must be done in exactly the right angle and location because the player must make it far enough back in order to fool the game's checkpoint system to have the lap counts and the player must hit the track at the right angle to have a chance at making it to the track what's more they're invisible out of bound patches across the gap between the track that must be avoided if they're hit the game recognizes the players being out of bounds and lakitu picks them up as Toulouse tool-assisted speedrun or tasks was essentially just a demonstration of what was possible it used tools like slowdowns and rerecords to create a theoretical speedrun today more than three years after the trix discovery nobody's been able to execute this trick in a real time speedrun of the track king alex has probably come the closest he estimates that he's done more than 10,000 attempts to get the trick some of his recent attempts have gotten good spin drifts but hit the out-of-bounds points that end the run whether king alex or some other player is able to pull off this trick it'll definitely be regarded as one of the finest runs in all of mario kart wii that's all for this game now we're going back to the handhelds again where we find a very unique iteration of Rainbow Road this is Mario Kart 7 [Music] mario kart sevens version of Rainbow Road is the first in the series to not have three laps of the same track instead it's one long course that's divided into three sections that count as laps Rainbow Road is widely regarded as one of Mario Kart sevens finest tracks and as a result it's had a pretty deep history for speedrunning unfortunately Mario Kart sevens replay system is similar to Mario Kart DS you have the option to view it in the action movie perspective or from a first-person perspective there exists methods of getting around it like using a 3ds capture card or just recording the run live with the camera but these methods were used pretty infrequently so most replays are from the first person the first verifiable record was a 142 by Walter in December 2011 the RIA dition of coins to the serie is made for a new challenge the player starts with zero coins and you pick up up to ten of them at a time each additional coin adds a little bit to your speed so the strategy around each turn wasn't simply to go as fast and as optimally as possible there is now the addition of trying to pick up as many coins as early as possible Mario Kart 7 also introduced gliding to the tracks where the player could slowly glide down to the ground after getting airtime Walter uses to his advantage to perform a small shortcut on the second segment of the track where he glided down to a lower path farther ahead he also cut this corner at the very end of Section three to end the course as with the other games the first record wouldn't last long the record time came down by about five and a half seconds by late 2012 some of the most prominent record holders at the time were doc o nasi and Nico these three guys broke the record at combined 25 times and they employed a number of new strategies to their advantage for example nasi figured out the fastest method of going over the wavy section in section 1 players normally just pressed R over and over to stunt repeatedly and gain speed boosts but nasi strategically hopped back and forth across the middle because of the way waves were formed it was possible to immediately stunt quickly on each side this way better methods of gliding were used by gliding quickly down and then up the cart overall moves faster through the air players had to figure out just how low they could go without being out of balance then zoom back up to get to the track by December 2012 a player known as Mon art would get the record what then began was an incredible streak of dominance as he found minor new strategies and improved his skills at racing Mon are broke the record 16 times in a row through early 2014 he used stuff like wall boosting when the player hits into certain walls in Mario Kart 7 it pushes them back at a higher speed than always driven into combined with the right angle this can be used at the railing around the corner just after the start of section 2 after Mon ARS last record in March 2014 he moved on to play Mario Kart 8 but his legacy in mario kart sevens Rainbow Road was firmly established he had taken the track to a new level of optimization and it seemed like hardly anybody had what it took to knock him off the top but there were a couple of players who had a chance go Goku 7 and Diogo these players each had drastically different experiences with the game but they were both legitimate contenders Diogo was a seasoned veteran of the game he had achieved World Records in the handful of tracks and Rainbow Road was just the next course he had his eyes on go Goku on the other hand was a rainbow road specialist virtually all of his efforts in speed running mario kart 7 were focused on Rainbow Road these guys had gone there times close to Mars record before go Goku broke through on June 23 2014 his time beat Mon ours by just 12 milliseconds and just six hours after garokk who announced this time Diogo announced that he too had broken mo nars record with a time sandwiched right in between mone ours and gogo goose however between these two runners only go Goku will continue the quest to bring rainbow road's record lower yoga moves on to playing Mario Kart 8 while go Goku poured everything he had into Rainbow Road he eventually realized that Rainbow Road had a magic number 135 a time on the outer limits of what could be realistically done his record was on 136 point two six one was it possible to take the quarter of a second off to get it to 135 over the following half decade go Goku would embark on a journey to find out [Music] [Music] one thirty five point nine nine six by the skin of his teeth go Goku had gone to 135 nearly five years after his first record go Goku's journey was complete he's achieved the last 11 records in a row on Rainbow Road and he's estimated the time had come down by only another point one to point two seconds it's probable that go Goku will be beaten one day but his achievements on the track are simply remarkable that's all for Mario Kart 7 after decades of journeys through Rainbow Road records it's time for the last one this is Mario Kart 8 [Music] Mario Kart 8's Rainbow Road actually has three different categories of world records the standard game has regular time trials but Mario Kart 8 deluxe an enhanced sport of the game for the switch has both 150 CC and 200 cc time trials each of these three categories has their own progression of world records but just to keep things simple we're gonna stick to the original Mario Kart 8 version as for the course itself it's quite similar to Mario Kart Wiis Rainbow Road part of the track has no walls on either side and the three laps fly by as the players constantly thrown new obstacles to overcome very early records from when the game came out in May 2014 showed how fast-paced the course was most of these times stood for just a few hours each but some of the most dominant players were Nyko and Kiki as the dust settled however a number of minor yet crucial racing techniques were developed probably the most famous one of these is fire hopping after getting a speed boost whether it be from a mini turbo a mushroom or a zipper the player can hop a few times to preserve the speed for longer this is because for karts and outward drifting bikes speed is lost more slowly in the air rather than on the ground so by maximizing time in the air the speed gained from a boost will last slightly longer in order to further extend the speed of a boost the player can also perform what's known as the and sliding it looks quite similar to fire hopping and typically is performed immediately after by subtly doing small quick drifts over and over speed is maintained more so than from just driving forward since fire hopping only works right after a boost demon sliding is useful to continue if reserving speed from the boost the easiest would at old demon sliding from fire hopping is smoke from the tyres if there's smoke then the player is demon sliding other techniques include brake drifting and soft earthen brake drifting involves tapping the brake button repeatedly during a drift to cut corners tighter similar to our tech and double dash this is used on Rainbow Road during the spiral turns that require the player to stay toward the center to go as fast as possible soft drifting involves angling the control stick up at a 45-degree angle during a drift this causes the mini turbo to be charged faster at the cost of a less sharp drift rainbow road's records slowly drop over the course of 2014 largely due to these strategies being used more and more frequently but Mario Kart 8 as a whole had something bigger going on as time had passed the community had adopted a goal get every single record in the game below two minutes most Mario Kart 8 records happens to be about two minutes long by nature with a few of them exceeding two minutes by a couple of seconds by July 2014 just one month after the game came out only six courses remained with a world record above two minutes and naturally as time went on players got better at demon sliding soft drifting all these minor little strategies that added up and one by one each of these records slipped to below 2 minutes [Music] by the time 2015 came just two Porsches arraigned but after ray achieved the 159 on DK Jungle at January that left one course of the record above two minutes Rainbow Road with the time of 2 minutes and ninety eight hundredths of a second by diogo who had previously battled go Goku for Mario Kart sevens Rainbow Road record and so the quest for sub 2 began other competitors like Danny took the record from them early on but by March 2015 the ogo was setting world record after world record he was refining his driving and adding in as many hops and slides as he could one strategy developed by Japanese player lights was fire hopping instead of sliding before this trick near the end of the lap normally fire hopping during a downward slope surface like this is ineffective but in May it was discovered that by angling the control stick 45 degrees fire hopping was much faster he also took advantage of a trick called cannon glider by hopping right before a glider Pat had just touched the end of it the glider comes out faster than normal saving a small amount of time then later that month he had a chance he had a solid first lap and after his second one he was just barely on pace for a sub - as he entered lap 3 the hundreds of hours he had put into optimizing this course were coming to fruition saying this was a high-pressure situation was an understatement to quote the ogo directly I heard my heart more than the actual music of the game in the third lap but as he drove around lap three diogo is finishing the job started by dozens of his peers 31 courses had accomplished their journey the sub - now it was rainbow road's turn as he crossed the finish line the ogle may not have been aware of what he had just done while on pace for his ultimate run Diogo had just driven the fastest third lap he had ever driven before the final time was 150 nine point nine zero three with less than a tenth of a second despair every track in Mario Kart 8 was completed under two minutes now that was more than four years ago since then the record has come down by a few tenths of a second players like Ishaq and Danny played a major role in this with Danny being the current world record holder but just like all the other rainbow roads the current record doesn't tell the full story the journey of how players got there shows the dedication patience and perseverance involved in setting these times this has been the history of Rainbow Road World Records thanks for watching hey I just wanted to let you all know about an upcoming Mike Tyson's punch-out speedrunning tournament I'm gonna be hosting it'll feature some of the top players in the world and it'll be taking place throughout the next couple of months you can watch it at twitch.tv /tko tournaments hope to see you there [Music]

Channel: Summoning Salt

Views: 5,565,085

Rating: 4.9408817 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: UuzUKT2Shn8

Length: 47min 4sec (2824 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 04 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/TheSlyGuy1]

I worked longer on this video than any other I've done. Started researching 4 months ago. Hope you guys are happy with how it turned out!

[u/Thecomedian1243]

One of the best YouTube channels out there. Very informative and entertaining videos. Can’t wait to listen to this.

[u/shamusisaninja]

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[u/Ramsus32]

I can barely make it through 5 minute youtube videos these days, yet I watch all of Summoning Salt videos start to finish with no issue. The information he gives, how he relays it, the editing, and the music, I love the music. It's all so freaking well done.

[u/__RocketMan__]

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[u/Todo88]

For anyone that didn't pick up on the "Not many athletes left name Bob" reference, do yourself a favor and watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvh6NLqKRfs

[u/Otteranon]

I love summoning salt videos, only bad thing is the months long wait between them, but the quality more than makes up for it!

[u/Xluxaeternax]

What are the differences between MK8 150cc and MK8DX 150cc?

[u/Ben2749]

Your channel is one of the few that I consider each new video an “event”. Infrequent, but incredibly entertaining. I enjoy them all, even ones on games I’ve never played. I can only imagine how much research goes into each one.

Thanks for the many hours of entertainment.