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.

"I'M SO FUCKING ECSTATIC I'M SHAKING," said one fan on Reddit. "IM FUCKIN [sic] GONNA EXPLODE."

"THIS GAME IS MY FAVORITE OF ALL TIME," said another. "I SQUEALED LIKE A PIG WHEN THEY ANNOUNCED IT." Those capitals are the posters’ own.

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. 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.

Since then it’s turned into its own mini-industry, with sequels spanning every Nintendo platform. It came first and defined a genre that quickly turned into the first choice for sloppy, borderline insulting merchandising tie-in games. Woody Woodpecker, Pacman, the Looney Tunes, Antz and, most bizarrely, M&Ms all had a dip, among others. That in turn has led your average nostalgist to presume Mario Kart 64 was the only one that really mattered.

But no. No. I’m sorry, no. No, no, no. No. No. Nooooo. Crash Team Racing was and remains the greatest racing game ever conceived. Today, though, it feels like it’s been almost completely overshadowed by the one featuring that lovesick moustachioed sadsack and his idiot brother.



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Despite great reviews and very tidy sales indeed, CTR never had that kind of era-defining success. But what it did do was perfect the (admittedly quite niche) form of the cartoonish multiplayer racing kart game.

On the face of it, CTR looked like a pretty transparent Mario Kart 64 rip-off. It could probably get away with four-way multiplayer races, a battle mode, unlockable characters from the expanded universe and even the hit-the-gas-just-before-the-lights starting grid boost, but taking literally all of Mario’s weapons and rebadging them was maybe a little bit too Homer-as-Guy-Incognito to ignore.

"Red shells? Surely, sir, you mean my entirely original heatseeking rockets! And those aren’t green shells, mushroom speed boosts and blue shells, oh no. Those are bowling bombs, gas canisters and a flying silver orb which zaps the player in first place with lightning." Hmm.

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It’s hard to ignore the similarities, sure. But CTR was no half-arsed kart-by-numbers, no Shrek Smash N Crash Racing. It took the tired idea of bodging pre-existing characters onto a kiddie-friendly racing framework and stuck a rocket under it.

CTR’s goofy, Muppet-ish sense of humour set it apart from Mario, for one thing. Mario is brilliant, obviously, but the only person with a worse gag hit-rate since 1983 than the little fella is Dan Aykroyd. At its best, it’s a nice bit of whimsy. Compared with that, CTR was an anarchic romp, tonally somewhere between a Vic and Bob sketch and The Mask.

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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. 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.

That, though, wouldn’t be true to the spirit of CTR. 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. You could take out half the pack with one of those bowling bombs, which had roughly the blast radius of a Trident missile.

More than anything, though, there was the opportunity to be incredibly snide and irritating. 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. That was pretty suspicious and could lead to a strop from your less experienced opponent. 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.

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When it really comes to it, though, the biggest gap was in the two frontmen. 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. 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.

He doesn’t want to be there. Look in his eyes. "Eyy! Why you no love-a the kart no more, ah?" Luigi asks him every morning. He can’t answer. He just packs his bananas and a couple of shrooms for the road, staring at the floor. "Mamma mia," Luigi sighs, watching from the kitchen window as Mario lurches out of the driveway. Crash, meanwhile, has been doing doughnuts around the car park of his local Halfords since 4am.

It might have been eclipsed in the popular imagination in the last 20 years by that plumber and his weird mates, but hopefully, this reimagined version of CTR will put it back in its rightful place at the top of the podium.

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