Crash, meanwhile, has been doing doughnuts around the car park of his local Halfords since 4am. "Mamma mia," Luigi sighs, watching from the kitchen window as Mario lurches out of the driveway. He just packs his bananas and a couple of shrooms for the road, staring at the floor. "Eyy! Why you no love-a the kart no more, ah?" Luigi asks him every morning. Mario though? In the absence of any rationale we’ll have to assume that, as with everything else in his miserable sewage-wading life, it’s probably about impressing Princess Peach. Mario might be driving around a track, but where’s he actually going? What’s his motivation for getting in the kart? It’s obvious that Crash, with his tongue-lolling grin, genuinely loves the gonzo thrills as well as needing to save Earth from Dr N Gin, a man with a nuclear weapon wedged in his skull. When it really comes to it, though, the biggest gap was in the two frontmen. Shithousing on CTR was a lot easier to conceal, with secret passageways and corner-cutting that would definitively but discreetly keep you ahead of the pack. That was pretty suspicious and could lead to a strop from your less experienced opponent. Mario Kart 64 had some shortcuts, but for the most part you needed to remember some arcane step sequence or fly backwards around the track to hit a particular brick in a tunnel to take an unfair advantage. More than anything, though, there was the opportunity to be incredibly snide and irritating. You could take out half the pack with one of those bowling bombs, which had roughly the blast radius of a Trident missile. It was far less interested in the refined aspects of kart control than in maximising its splenetic cartoonishness, supercharging the chaos of Mario Kart 64 with faster action and ludicrously powerful weapons. That, though, wouldn’t be true to the spirit of CTR. We could talk, too, about how the karts actually did what you wanted them to with ease and responsiveness, but also with a sense of heft that made you feel like you were actually a motorsporting genius when things went right. We could talk about gameplay, design and internal mechanics about how apparently simple tracks packed in endless textures, terrains and hazards to navigate, and how that kept the action enticingly unpredictable and hard to tame. Today, though, it feels like it’s been almost completely overshadowed by the one featuring that lovesick moustachioed sadsack and his idiot brother. Crash Team Racing was and remains the greatest racing game ever conceived. That in turn has led your average nostalgist to presume Mario Kart 64 was the only one that really mattered.īut no. Woody Woodpecker, Pacman, the Looney Tunes, Antz and, most bizarrely, M&Ms all had a dip, among others. It came first and defined a genre that quickly turned into the first choice for sloppy, borderline insulting merchandising tie-in games.
Since then it’s turned into its own mini-industry, with sequels spanning every Nintendo platform. Released in 1996, it became the second-best-selling game on the N64 with more than 9.6 million units sold and defined who knows how many house parties, post-pub sessions and the hours after school between the end of the kickabout and the beginning of your tea. The way that pop cultural memory picks out and preserves some artefacts is odd, isn’t it? Now, Mario Kart 64 is the one karting game that lives on. "I SQUEALED LIKE A PIG WHEN THEY ANNOUNCED IT." Those capitals are the posters’ own.
"THIS GAME IS MY FAVORITE OF ALL TIME," said another. " I'M SO FUCKING ECSTATIC I'M SHAKING," said one fan on Reddit. When a remastered version of the 1999 PlayStation game Crash Team Racing - Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fuelled - was announced six months ago, it was met with an unexpected outpouring of quite terrifyingly volcanic joy.