Reporting on Mario Kart 64 World Records

Abstract

Investigating how the world record for Choco Mountain in Mario Kart 64 developed over time.

Introduction

Mario Kart 64 is a racing video game developed and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo 64.

Players can choose from eight characters to race as, including:

• Mario
• Toad
• Princess Peach

The game consists of 16 tracks to race around. World records can be set for either one lap or a full race (three laps) of the course. As players have competed for faster times, several track shortcuts have been discovered. There are separate world records for both with and without the use of a shortcut.

Methods

We loaded a dataset of Mario Kart 64 world records. This data is from tidytuesday with credit to Benedikt Claus.

For this investigation we are interested in the world records for Choco Mountain over a three-lap course. The dataset was loaded and filtered using pandas:

import pandas as pd

# Load the records data
records = pd.read_csv(
    "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/master/data/2021/2021-05-25/records.csv"
)
# Filter the data
choco_mountain = records.loc[
        (records["track"] == "Choco Mountain") &
        (records["type"] == "Three Lap")
].reset_index()
# View the data
choco_mountain.head()

	index	track	type	shortcut	player	system_played	date	time_period	time	record_duration
0	862	Choco Mountain	Three Lap	No	Gregg G	NTSC	1997-03-10	2M 7.96S	127.96	78
1	863	Choco Mountain	Three Lap	No	Launspach	NTSC	1997-05-27	2M 3.65S	123.65	95
2	864	Choco Mountain	Three Lap	No	Booth	NTSC	1997-08-30	2M 1.42S	121.42	7
3	865	Choco Mountain	Three Lap	No	Booth	NTSC	1997-09-06	2M 0.91S	120.91	188
4	866	Choco Mountain	Three Lap	No	Booth	NTSC	1998-03-13	2M 0.23S	120.23	130

Results

The figure below shows the development of world records for the Choco Mountain track on Mario Kart N64 from 1917 to 2021.

Progress of Choco Mountain world records, with and without allowing shortcuts.

The longest a 3 lap world record was held for on Choco Mountain is 2742 days (7.5 years).