Enlarge / Is this Super Mario Kart or Where’s Waldo?
Here at Ars, we’re big fans of emulators and ROM hacks that actually improve on the limitations of classic games in some way or another. Today, though, we’ve found ourselves enamored with a Super Mario Kart ROM patch that easily makes the game much, much worse.
Longtime Super Mario Kart hacker MrL314 calls Resident Evil Kart “the worst thing I have ever created,” and it’s not hard to see why. As implied by the title, the ROM patch replaces Super Mario Kart‘s usual over-the-shoulder tracking camera with something more akin to the awkward fixed-angle “perspective shots” of the original PlayStation 1 Resident Evil games. The perspective automatically jumps between these fixed cameras around the track as your racer moves from section to section, forcing you to judge turns and obstacles from very skewed angles.
Back then, he said, “this thing is a NIGHTMARE to play, but honestly I might actually release a polished version of it, since it is kinda cool honestly.” On Wednesday, he followed through with that plan, releasing a final version of Resident Evil Kart to the public as a ROM patch (which requires an original, unheadered, US Super Mario Kart ROM to be playable).
Watch where you’re going!
After playing the newly released public version of the hack this afternoon, we feel that MrL314 is, underselling just how difficult the fixed camera angle makes the game. The vagaries of the Super Nintendo’s Mode 7 scaling mean your racer is often reduced to a small blob of pixels that only give a vague indication of their true position and orientation on the course (a combination with that high-resolution Mode 7 mod might have helped on that score). Then, just when you’ve kind of gotten used to navigating from one perspective, the camera suddenly jumps to a new location and angle, forcing you to realign yourself on the fly.
Enlarge/ A new perspective makes this ghost house even scarier.
Still, after a little practice, I found this “Nightmare” mode wasn’t impossible. With a few practice races, I could finish in first place on the first two Mushroom Cup tracks (at 50cc, at least) before finally giving up on Ghost Valley 1 and its destructible side barriers. Players who find it all too overwhelming can also cheat by glancing at the fixed, three-quarters Super Off-Road-style map view on the bottom half of the screen.
If nothing else, Resident Evil Kart makes us wonder what other classic games might take on new life just by changing their camera angles. Already, we’ve seen versions of Super Mario Bros.played from a first-person perspective and Virtua Racing played from the game’s dynamic “Live Camera” perspective. But how about reimagining Star Fox 64 as a top-down shoot-em-up or a first-person, VR version of Bubble Bobble? The sky’s the limit here, people.
Enlarge/ A Vectrex console and CRT display with a cart for a long-lost game.
Tim Stevens
The Vectrex may be the most innovative video game console you’ve never heard of. It had everything it needed to prompt a revolution, including controllers far more sophisticated than the competition and the ability to render polygons a decade before gaming’s 3D revolution.
It was years ahead of anything else on the market, yet it could not have launched at a worse time. The Vectrex hit stores at the tail end of 1982. Over the next six months, the then-booming video game market went bust. The Vectrex, a potential revolution in home gaming, was swept into bargain bins, forgotten by all but the most ardent of collectors.
Forty years later, it’s having something of a comeback. New developers are breathing fresh code into this aged machine, hardware hackers and tinkerers are ensuring that tired capacitors and CRTs stay functional, and a new game has seen retail release after sitting unplayed for four decades.
This, finally, could be the Vectrex’s time to shine.
Vectrex history
1982 was a banner year for video games. Titles like Zaxxon, Pole Position, Q*bert, and Dig Dug were fresh in the arcades. In the home gaming scene, seemingly unquenchable consumer desire fueled a period of innovation unlike anything the now $200 billion industry has seen since.
To give some context, Sony sold 11.8 million PlayStation 5s in 2021, the console’s first full year of availability. Back in 1982, 12 million Atari 2600 home consoles flew off store shelves, despite the nascent home gaming industry amounting to a paltry $4 billion.
This boom drove the creation of the Vectrex. The system was born at LA-based hardware design firm Smith Engineering. Envisioned as a portable system with a tiny, 1-inch cathode ray tube screen, the Vectrex concept ultimately grew into the 9-inch screen production version you see here.
Kenner Toys was initially slated to release the system, but when that deal fell through, General Consumer Electronics (GCE) stepped in and brought it to market in late 1982 after a successful debut at that summer’s Consumer Electronics Show. The Vectrex’s initial buzz was so successful that Milton Bradley acquired GCE in 1983.
The Vectrex design was unique, a video game console wholly integrated into a portrait-oriented CRT. This was at a time when most households had just a single television set. Playing Atari back then meant fighting with your siblings and parents about who had control of the TV because missing an episode of The A-Team had real consequences. Not only was DVR technology still decades away, Sony was still trying to say that recording television programs on VCR cassettes was illegal.
But the real reason for the Vectrex’s integrated display was its reliance on a display technique not seen on a home system before (nor since). Vector graphics are a true rarity on the gaming scene. 1979’s Asteroids is probably the most famous example, while 1983’s Star Wars is far and away the most impressive.
Outside of a few exceptions, every video game you’ve ever played has been made up of a series of pixels. Whether it’s CRT, LCD, LED, or even OLED, you’re still talking about images made up of tiny dots of light. As the years have progressed, those pixels have gotten smaller and smaller. Likewise, the graphical power provided by advanced GPU systems like the GeForce RTX 4090 allows those pixels to assemble into ever-more realistic 3D worlds.
Ultimately, though, it’s all a bunch of pixels. On the Vectrex, there are no pixels. As its name implies, graphics here are all made up of vectors. That means straight beams of light drawn from A to B, electrons shot straight and narrow onto a cathode ray tube that glows in response. Connect three such lines, and you have a triangle, a simple polygon, the building block of all mainstream 3D gaming even today.
That lack of pixels means that, even 40 years on, watching a Vectrex game in action is an oddly captivating thing. There’s a fluidity in the rudimentary graphics, an innate sharpness that was not only lacking in other games of the period but that still looks novel today.
Overall fidelity, however, is admittedly low. Though color TVs were well and truly mainstream by 1983, the Vectrex is decidedly black and white, a problem “solved” by some crafty, budget-minded engineering. Most Vectrex titles came with a transparent overlay, a full-color sheet of plastic that clips in place over the display, injecting some hue into the unfortunately desaturated CRT.
Powering this was a relatively simple set of silicon with an 8-bit Motorola 6809 microprocessor at its heart, the same processor behind arcade classics like Robotron: 2084 and many later Williams pinball machines. It ran at a mighty 1 MHz with a whole 1KB of RAM at its disposal.
The chip was paired with an integrated control pad with an analog joystick, far more advanced than the four-way joysticks found on every other home console controller at the time.
All that specialized hardware led to a specialized price. The Vectrex launched in 1982 at $199—about $650 in 2023 dollars. Less than 18 months later, it was dead.
The collector
Sean Kelly is among the world’s preeminent video game collectors. “I’ve been collecting video games for a long time,” he told me. “I’ve had probably over 100,000 video games pass through my hands over the years.” At one point, he said, he had more than 50,000 in his garage.
If that sounds like an industrial operation rather than a mere obsession, you’re not wrong. Kelly is co-founder of the National Videogame Museum in Frisco, Texas, established in 2016 and home to many unicorns of video game collecting, like an original Nintendo World Championship cartridge.
Perhaps it was an affinity for another failed early ’80s console—the Intellivision—that initially fostered Kelly’s love of video games, but he’s had a huge hand in keeping the Vectrex alive. He began by releasing so-called multi-carts, Vectrex cartridges that contained multiple discrete games accessed first by toggling DIP switches and later via a software menu.
Considering many Vectrex titles saw limited releases or no release at all, multi-carts like this were the only way for those few die-hard fans of the system to ever have a chance of playing them.
One of those games was Mail Plane, where you plot optimal delivery routes, then load up the packages and navigate across the country.
Thanks to the Vectrex’s abrupt cancellation, Mail Plane never saw release. You’d be forgiven for thinking it had, though. At Sean’s website, VectrexMulti, you’ll find boxed copies of Mail Plane ready to order.
The game comes in the silvery packaging that was standard for Vectrex releases in its day and even comes with a light pen, a peripheral used for keying in those delivery routes.
Kelly sourced manufacturers for every aspect of the retail packaging. Different prototype versions of the game code were floating around, but Kelly says most were incomplete. “In addition to collecting the video games, I’ve also had a passion for hunting down the people that used to produce the games,” he said. This began a quest to find the most complete version of Mail Plane.
“We would find this former employee or that former employee had a couple of cartridges, and we would go through the cartridges and look at them,” Kelly said, and he ultimately sourced the one closest to final. “Nobody knows for sure if it’s 100 percent complete, but generally, we believe that that’s the most complete version.”
He gave other games the same treatment, including Tour de France, in which you frantically pedal across a polygonal route to Paris, grabbing water bottles along the way and carefully managing the stamina of your rider. It’s an odd title, one that Kelly laments hasn’t exactly been a sales success. “Tour de France is one of the ones that I will be buried with,” he said. “I lost money on Tour de France.”
Kelly declined to say which games have made money, but it’s clear in speaking to him that this is all about passion, not profits.
Along the way, releasing those games provided Kelly and his associates with some valuable experience ahead of a surprise: the discovery of a game that seemingly nobody, not even those who worked for GCE or Milton Bradley, had ever heard of.
For decades after its 1989 release, each of the hundreds of millions of standard NES Tetris games ended the same way: A block reaches the top of the screen and triggers a “game over” message. That 34-year streak was finally broken on December 21, 2023, when 13-year-old phenom BlueScuti became the first human to reach the game’s “kill screen” after a 40-minute, 1,511-line performance, crashing the game by reaching its functional limits.
The game-crashing, record-setting performance. Jump to 38: 56 for BlueScuti’s disbelieving reaction to his achievement and a short interview.
What makes BlueScuti’s achievement even more incredible (as noted in some excellent YouTube summaries of the scene) is that, until just a few years ago, the Tetris community at large assumed it was functionally impossible for a human to get much past 290 lines. The road to the first NES Tetris kill screen highlights the surprisingly robust competitive scene that still surrounds the classic game and just how much that competitive community has been able to collectively improve in a relatively short time.
From hypertaps to rolling
If and when a player reaches Level 29 on NES Tetris (after clearing between 230 to 290 lines, depending on the starting level), the game reaches its highest possible speed. At this point, simply holding down left or right on the NES D-pad can’t usually get a piece all the way to the side of the well unless the board is extremely “low” (i.e., pieces only on the first one or two rows, maximum). Thus, for years, players that reached Level 29 found their games usually “topped out” just a few pieces later.
A demonstration of hypertapping technique.
The first known way past the brick wall of Level 29 was a technique that became known as hypertapping. By using a special grip that lets you vibrate a finger over the D-pad directions at least 10 times a second, you can effectively skip the “delayed autoshift” (DAS) that limits how fast pieces can move laterally when the D-pad is held down.
With hypertapping, players can effectively move pieces at Level 29 speed even when the board is stacked four or five levels high. While that gives a little breathing room, a run of bad pieces or execution can still put a hypertapper in an untenable position where the pieces start to stack up high, and completing new lines becomes essentially impossible.
The first Level 30 NES Tetris performance on record, from back in 2011.
A deep dive into the advanced Tetris control technique known as rolling.
Then, in 2021, a new, even faster button-mashing technique appeared on the competitive Tetris scene. This “rolling” technique was inspired by arcade player Hector “Fly” Rodriguez, who used a similar multi-finger roll to set button-mashing records on the Track & Field arcade game. Tetris players adapted this technique by combining it with a grip that lets you tap the back of the NES controller with a “roll” of three to five successive fingers. This roll of the fingers then nudges the D-pad into a finger on the other hand to register an extremely quick series of directional button presses.
Rolling is fast enough to get pieces to the sides on Level 29-speed boards stacked up to eight rows high, giving Tetris masters quite a bit of leeway in their quest for longer games. Cheez, one of the first players to master the rolling technique, hit Level 40 in 2021, but that was just the start of how far things could go.
A Level 146 performance from 2022 that shows NES Tetris can be effectively played indefinitely at Level 29 speed.
