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Prerelease:Mario Kart 64/Internal Material
This is a sub-page of Prerelease:Mario Kart 64.
 | This article is a work in progress. ...Well, all the articles here are, in a way. But this one moreso, and the article may contain incomplete information and editor's notes. |
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A portion of Mario Kart 64's source code, as well as other early assets such as textures and models, were present among the July 25, 2020 asset leak, having seemingly been among the assets given to iQue by Nintendo in order to produce the Chinese version.
Contents
Courses
A developer interview in 1996 mentions two courses that were cut during development. "There were a number of courses we had to drop, too. One was a big, multi-story parking garage-like structure, which you’d race around and around as you ascended it. At first, we thought it would be a nice, realistic track, and that it would be really fun, but when people actually played it the constant turning and turning as you went up quickly made them feel sick. (laughs) We also made a big city track, with a castle, and a nice pond, where you got to race around all these different houses and buildings. Unfortunately, it was a very large map, and it took too much time to race through. So we cut it."
TOWN
The city track's model is located in TOWN_PK within the kimura archive, complete with all the textures. It is referred to as TOWN internally, and seems to match the description by the developers of it being very large. Similar-looking city tracks were later used in Mario Kart Tour.
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| A GIF showing the path racers were intended to take. | A render of the startline. |
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| A render showing a cafe (left) and the church (right). | A render showing more buildings. |
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| A render showing the tunnel entrance. | Another render of the tunnel entrance. |
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| A render showing some farmlands. | A render showing a restaurant. |
A minimap for the track was found in image/minimap.c. Oddly, it shows all the roads in it, rather than just the roads that were driveable.
There is also a TOWN_point file which contains data like enemy paths, item paths, and object placement. Oddly, the points for this seem to match up with Luigi Raceway, suggesting that it replaced TOWN eventually.
Garage
The parking garage track mentioned in the interview also has remnants left over. While no model was among the asset leak, there were several textures for stuff like level markers.
Minimaps
There are minimaps located in image/minimap.c, which have the first 8 minimaps with Debug Menu order and Town. Most of them are the same as final, but some of them are different.
Bowser's Castle
| Proto | Final |
|---|---|
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- There are much less turns than in the final, and the end part was simplified.
Banshee Boardwalk
| Proto | Final |
|---|---|
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- The house part has no holes or walls.
Yoshi Valley
| Proto | Final |
|---|---|
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- The early version had a few more paths.
Koopa Troopa Beach
| Proto | Final |
|---|---|
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- The lake near the shortcut was missing.
Royal Raceway
| Proto | Final |
|---|---|
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- The track looked way different, jumps may have not been implemented at that point in developement.
Misc.
There is a copy of Moo Moo Farm in [LOCATION], but it uses the old file format (the same one that TOWN uses).
Items
Multiple scrapped items were found.
From left to right:
- A Yoshi egg, which in Super Mario Kart could only be used by the CPU-controlled Yoshi.
- A set of six marble-like objects.
- An old design for singular Mushrooms.
- An old design for Triple Mushrooms.
- A Cape Feather, also from Super Mario Kart.
- A weight.
The egg would eventually appear as an item in Mario Kart: Double Dash!!.
Textures
Miscellaneous Track Textures
Several track textures that never ended up being used.
Two pairs of "Welcome" and "Exit" signs, probably meant for Yoshi's Valley.
Koopa Troopa Beach
A shark and a wave texture, meant to be used in the water of Koopa Troopa Beach.
Kalimari Desert
Leaves and soil meant to be used for a scrapped tornado.
Billboards
An early international Yoshi billboard.
An early Koopa Air billboard that instead says Good Ear. It could've been removed to be less copyright-infringing or to be more Mario-themed (or both).
An early "Shot!" billboard that originally said "Shell" Strangely, the S is reversed. The S also uses an early design.
result00
result/result00.sgi is an early screenshot featuring the old sprites, Magikoopa/Kamek, and an early version of the item box. This screenshot seems to be taken just before this other screenshot.
Title Screen Logo
Originally, the Chinese version of Mario Kart 64 was called Mario Kart iQue, instead of just Mario Kart.
There is also a very early placeholder logo, probably used at the very start of the localization's developement.
Placeholder Title Screen
Located in kimura.lzh/kwastatic.c and nearly identical to the Japanese Super Mario Kart logo, with the exception that Mario's mouth is not open.
This was used in many Super Mario Kart prototypes that were also part of the July 25, 2020 leak.
Misc.
Speedometer
An early sprite from kimura/sprite.c, this may have been used as an early speedometer.
Goomba
A Goomba texture, from Super Mario 64, meant to test animations.
Egg
A Yoshi egg, probably meant for the unused Egg item.
Unused Font
This font seems to be from an early version of Super Mario 64.
+Z Lighting
Lighting possibly meant for Super Mario 64, as it matches the lighting on Mario seen in an animation made for the Space World 1995 B-Roll, seen here.
