[00:24] 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 Choco Mountain, but it turns out that's
[00:38] not the only course the speedrunners have destroyed. its exploits over the years. Its world record is coveted with racers battling
[00:50] 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.
[01:04] Mario Kart game. [Music]
[01:31] 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, drive a single lap of a track the fastest. So, two big categories are
[01:46] whether or not a speedrunner is trying for a threelap 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
[01:59] 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 you to do to save time. So something like going through the tunnel in Koopa
[02:12] Troopa Beach isn't a shortcut, but launching yourself with Yoshi far off to places you diagonally backwards at the finish line to skip a lap is considered finish line to skip a lap is considered a shortcut. Yes, that is a real shortcut
[02:25] in this game. So those are the four categories of Fraps noand time trials. Shortcut threelap, nonshortcut three lap, shortcut flap, and nonshortcut flap. We're going to start with nonshortcut flap. The goal here, simply
[02:40] drive one lap around Frap Snowland as fast as possible.
[02:54] Mario Kart 64 isn't easy to show off, mainly because there's not video for a lot of them. Fortunately, the website mkwrs.com has compiled a list of world records over time, so we know what the record probably was. But back then, the
[03:08] proof needed to claim a 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
[03:21] respect. So, if you were a respected member of your community, your times would usually be respected, too. Anyway, the Frap Snowland nonshortut seconds by a handful of American and Canadian players. But then a guy named
[03:37] PEV 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
[03:51] running in slow motion, being played at about 56 the speed of the NTSC version. This meant that an equivalent time between NTSC and PAL would be about 17% slower on PAL. So to compensate for this, the combined leaderboard system
[04:06] 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 would be submitted with two times, an NTSC time and a PAL
[04:20] 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.
[04:33] By the turn of the century, the POW time had gotten down to 39 seconds before Mike S. set 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
[04:48] quality. So, we'll take a look at this one by Carlo from 2006. 38.71, a world record by 002 seconds.
[05:04] There's a few things to pay attention to here. Firstly, the mini turbos. Whenever Carlo turned, he was usually doing what's known as a mini turbo. By can then wiggle the thumb stick back and forth two times, and the smoke
[05:19] underneath will change from white to yellow to orange. Once it's orange, the player can release the drift, and their character will get a slight speed boost. and over to get as many speed boosts as possible. Carlo played as Toad since he,
[05:36] 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
[05:49] go out of bounds and be picked up by Lacatu, but you can go into it a little bit while still staying in bounds, although your cart does slow down. So strategic places over the snow to cut out corners of the track. The first was
[06:02] at the very start of the lap, while the second and third were over these small hills of snow. Carlo's record only stood for 2 days before being beaten by a legendary run from a player known as MJ, a 38.68,
[06:16] which stood for an incredible 6 and 1/2 years. That run was eventually topped by Zoran, who was then beaten by the one and only VJ. VJ was known for his rather excited reactions to his world records.
[06:30] reactions to his world records. This is what I'm talking about. World records. Check this out. I beat the But this time he was a bit more subdued.
[06:44] Yeah, [ __ ] Since VAJ's record in 2012, 15 new records have been set, all of which came from just two players, Matias Rustmire
[06:56] or Mr. and Dan Burbank. Matias had the world record in early 2014 with a 38.60, but Dan saw potential to take it lower, mainly based upon the hill they used the second mushroom on. Matias was taking
[07:10] than players in the past, cutting the worked hard to perfect this by jumping far left in the air and cutting back right to land closer to the track. He
[07:22] also began to do a mini turbo slightly sooner after this hill jump than Matias did. In both these situations, we're talking about tiny amounts of time save, just a few hundreds of a second, but in a run this precise, every frame counts.
[07:36] These two players traded the record back and forth for a few months as the time went down from the 3860s to the 3850s and eventually to the 3840s. at 25 or 30 frames per second, the
[07:50] players can only gain time in increments of about 004, but the game has a precise method 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 hundth of a
[08:02] second based upon that. So, it was actually possible to improve by just .001. Most of Dan's records at this point were actually played on NTSC rather than PAL. But Dan switched to playing on POW in early 2015. And once
[08:16] he did, he set four world records in a row. But Matias eventually began changing his second shroom jump to be more like Dan's. Once he did, he got a world record of 38.29. And to this day, Dan hasn't been able to
[08:30] And to this day, Dan hasn't been able to beat that time. He's gotten so so close, getting as low as 38.30. But Matias's record has now stood for over four years. So that's it for the non-shortcut flap record. It's time to
[08:44] talk about some shortcuts. This is the history of the shortcut flap record. Welcome to 1997. [Music]
[09:06] named David Juan began posting about shortcut discoveries he was finding. And one of the craziest ones he discovered was from May 1997 on Frap Snowland. By going backwards at the start to the bridge, then driving off of it directly
[09:20] onto the snow, passing the finish line that extends outwards to start the lap, then going out of bounds. The game thinks you're at the end of the lap when Lacatu sets you down. All you have to do then is drive forward and you finish a
[09:33] lap. This trick works because of Mario Kart 64's strange way of keeping track of where you are. There are 646 markers around the track that the game uses to determine where your cart is. If you're within 20 markers of the finish line,
[09:47] the game knows you're close. So, it'll add a lap if you cross a finish line and subtract one if you cross it the other way. The cut off point for the 20 markers is right in front of the bridge. So, if you go onto the snow there and go
[10:01] out of bounds just past the finish line, the game last has your location as set the game last has your location as set more than 20 markers away. so it doesn't back across the finish line and you're at the end of the next lap. Players
[10:15] apply this trick to a flap 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 of the video. Miles went to the end of a
[10:30] the snow and positioned himself right very edge of what's considered still in bounds. By then driving forward slightly, the lap ended and he was immediately out of bounds and picked up
[10:43] by Lacatu. Upon being placed down, a welltimed mushroom and drift was all that was needed. This time of 5.40 or 6.49 49 on PAL was essentially the lowest this time could go and a few
[10:56] 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 line.
[11:10] 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 where if you land there, the game doesn't subtract a lap upon getting
[11:26] placed 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 bounds before getting there. But hey, this is Mario Kart 64, so of
[11:41] course there's a way around that. This time, it's thanks to a trick called the Lacatu effect. After setting you down, Lacatu has a brief period of time where he can't pick you up again, even if you go out of bounds. So, the player could
[11:54] get to the end of a lap, drive out of bounds, get picked up by Lacatu, get set down, then immediately spin left and use a mushroom, hit off a hill to get air, barely cross the finish line, then hook back left onto the polygon before Lacatu
[12:08] is finally able to stop you and pick you up. When Lacatu 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
[12:21] next few years, eventually getting it down to a 4.90 NTSC time, where it stood as a three-way tie between Greg Eye, Miles, and VHJ. But then on September
[12:33] 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. how to do it, this happened. [Music]
[12:58] He accidentally beat the world record by a hundth of a second. Legendary stuff. This time was equivalent to a 5.88 on Powell. A couple years later, the
[13:10] strategy would once again be improved. This time by a guy named Marcos by closer to the finish line. You'd be placed down by Lacatu a bit farther different version of the shortcut by getting a big bounce off the base of the
[13:25] hill, landing a bit closer on the polygon and ultimately getting picked up placed close to the finish line. Once again, it saves just a tiny bit of time a bit harder. Marcos took the record down to 5.77 in
[13:41] July 2016, which is where the record stood for over 3 years. But by the middle of 2019, a player known as ABNE 317 was getting close to it with a 5.83.
[13:57] 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 5-second lap. to pull off a 5-second lap. [Music]
[14:11] [Music] Oh, what the heck? What? I like didn't He had done most of the shortcut correctly, but his bounce was strange. It went forward instead of to the left, hence his exasperated reaction. He
[14:25] wasn't on the correct polygon, and the trick wouldn't work. Right. Didn't trick wouldn't work. Right. Didn't turn.
[14:37] What? [Music] And by all estimations, this attempt shouldn't have worked. But instead, he
[14:51] beat Marcos by a full tenth of a second. It turns out his 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
[15:06] bit of preparation, landing in any of these polygons would work. Abony 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
[15:19] shortcut, are mapped to give you a position of more than 20 markers behind the finish line. He then moved slightly to the left while facing to the right, crossing back over the finish line. But since the game thought he was behind
[15:33] marker 20, it 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
[15:47] far left, saving him the time over Marcos's world record. Frap Snowland's shortcut flap record is crazy. But perhaps the only strategy crazier than that is driving three of those laps with crazy precision needed to snag a world
[16:01] record. Welcome to the threelap shortcut record. It looks like this.
[16:16] The threelap 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 B to spin. Keep spinning with AB and go
[16:29] onto the snow. Then go out of bounds where you need to. Upon being put down on the bridge, the player AB spins again to get to the snow. And then this is repeated so the player can simply drive forward to finish the lap. For the first
[16:42] several years after the shortcut was developed in 1997, it was the usual suspects taking the record down. Penv had a dominant streak in the late '90s, taking the record down to a 26-second PAL time. In 2002, Ben M went on a
[16:56] streak of his own, setting five records in a row. But none of these old records seem to have surviving video today. But in 2003, the strategy for the course changed a little bit. Weatherton figured out that it was actually slightly faster
[17:10] to go to the left and go out of bounds instead of to the right. So, starting in 2003, when players were set down on the bridge, they would quickly do an AB spin and then turn left, then mushroom out of balance. Players still did their first
[17:24] shortcut to the right since going left on the initial spin back to the bridge is very difficult. In the mid200s, players continued to take fractions of a second off the record as the time crept down to a lower 26. Eventually, they
[17:38] began to go left on the first lap too to save the extra time, even though it was save the extra time, even though it was harder, as evidenced by VAJ's 26.08 from 2007. But then, over the next few years, an
[17:50] incredible world record battle developed between Greg I and VJ. 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
[18:04] 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
[18:17] to go out of bounds sooner after crossing the finish line, but Lacatu 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
[18:29] the finish line for the glitch to still work, but you respawned in front of the differences in where you had to go out of bounds for each path, and the differences in where you respawned. Respawning farther forward makes it
[18:43] harder to quickly get back to the snow and have 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 of bounds sooner, then take the red forward
[18:55] path for the last laps 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 VJ correctly did two
[19:08] wides and net forward. In the end, though, it wouldn't matter. These guys would end up getting the exact same time of 25.86 in 2012, a tied world record of 25.86 in 2012, a tied world record that stood for 6 years. By 2018, it was
[19:23] the oldest world record in the game. But that year, Abney used research to his advantage to beat it. Hopping before doing an AB spin increases the speed at which you turn, so Abney hops before the AB spin on the bridge on lap one. He
[19:37] also held the AB 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 Weatherton, were enough to help him beat the oldest world record in the game by a
[19:50] tenth 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.
[20:04] Over the years, this record has been refined to where your driving needs to be essentially flawless everywhere with corner cuts needing to be perfect down to the hundth of a second. It's the absolute test of how well a player can
[20:17] drive. This is the nonshortcut three-lap record. record. [Music]
[20:30] being traded back and forth between Penev and Peter E. They took turns taking it down from 204 all the way to 2011. Despite the fact that Peter Ree played on NTSC, he was able to outlast PennV and ultimately beat him. By 2005,
[20:45] Eddie T was able to provide us with the first video of a threelap non-shortcut first video of a threelap non-shortcut record, a 2011.19 that was played on NTSC. His record had everything you'd expect in it. tight drifting around snow
[20:58] them without touching them and slowing down, and getting the right angle around every turn. It's important to note where he used each of his three mushrooms. He used one on each lap during the spot that the third mushroom was used in the
[21:12] flap record. He cut right over the snowbank, then hopped down to the track. MJ was the first person to take the record under 2011, getting 2 minutes.98 record under 2011, getting 2 minutes.98 in March 2008. But in 2014, the scene
[21:27] would once again shift. And over the following several months, records would trade hands between two people over and over. Just like for the flap record, they did it again here. This is the battle between Matias and Dan.
[21:48] minutes and 5,500s of a second in November 2014. This was actually the first POW world record Dan had ever held. But Matias wasn't about to be beaten by a newcomer. So he lowered the record by 6 hundreds of a second on the
[22:02] same day that Dan got his record. It took Dan a while, but in February 2015, he once again beat Matias. But Matias once again quickly dethrown Dan. It took him an entire week this time. This pattern continued throughout 2015. Dan
[22:19] would beat Matias, but then Matias would be back on top a few days later. The difference in how they handled the mushroom section. Matias was very perfectly to directly head back to the track after hopping over the hill. While
[22:34] Dan struggled with this and couldn't fix the line of his cart correctly, it cost him literally just hundreds of a second. But when someone was beating you by that small of an amount, it mattered. Eventually, Dan couldn't keep up with
[22:47] Matias. So, Matias 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 2 minutes. Through better driving and optimizing the Shroom Hill Jump to cut
[23:02] as much of the track as possible. Now, Matias had a new goal. Take the time below 2 minutes. It was a time people had deemed to be impossible, including Matias himself. But as he got better at the track, he started to doubt himself.
[23:18] Could he actually take it there? [Music]
[24:01] [Music] Yeah, you got it. less. Oh, wow.
[24:15] He was a hundth of a second away. Months of attempts had gotten him just a hundth of a second away from glory. Matias had set dozens upon dozens of world records in Mario Kart 64 across every track, but never before had he grinded for a record
[24:30] never before had he grinded for a record like this. He just had to take 0.01 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 100th of a second off of Fraps
[24:43] Snowland would be so much more difficult than anybody could have imagined.
[26:10] Yes. Oh god, I was so in pain. I was so in pain the last few minutes.