Reporting on Mario Kart 64 World Records

Abstract

Investigating how the world record for Rainbow Road 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 rainbow road 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
rainbow_road = records.loc[
        (records["track"] == "Rainbow Road") &
        (records["type"] == "Three Lap")
].reset_index()
# View the data
rainbow_road.head()

	index	track	type	shortcut	player	system_played	date	time_period	time	record_duration
0	2155	Rainbow Road	Three Lap	No	Booth	NTSC	1997-05-27	6M 15.83S	375.83	92
1	2156	Rainbow Road	Three Lap	No	Jonathan	NTSC	1997-08-27	6M 9.67S	369.67	140
2	2157	Rainbow Road	Three Lap	No	Zwartjes	PAL	1998-01-14	6M 8.69S	368.69	58
3	2158	Rainbow Road	Three Lap	No	Jonathan	NTSC	1998-03-13	6M 5.51S	365.51	173
4	2159	Rainbow Road	Three Lap	No	Penev	PAL	1998-09-02	6M 4.15S	364.15	9

Results

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

Progress of Rainbow Road world records, with and without allowing shortcuts.

The longest a 3 lap world record was held for on Rainbow Road is 2214 days (6.1 years).