Meerkat Prompts: What don’t you know about me?
What’s something most people don’t know about you?
Hmm. I suspect most people don’t know I once held a world record! It was nothing major, and the niche is quite limited, but nonetheless I briefly held a time-trial world record for the first circuit of the PAL edition of Super Mario Kart.
Since I set it, others eclipsed it, particularly with a sort of jump technique that granted good speed over normally slow terrain. I never mastered this skill, so my record is basically a ‘traditional’ one, set by seeking as much as speed over the track itself. I managed to set it by sheer perseverance, relentlessly playing the level over and over again, seeking to nail each lap as perfectly as humanly possible. My initial reason for this was a bit of friendly rivalry with a friend, who was also setting some insanely fast times. These days, this old greymuzzle’s reactions are not what they used to be, and I doubt I’d get anywhere close to my old speed, let alone threaten the current world records.
You may be wondering what I mean by the PAL edition, and this is to do with the differences between US and Japanese/European hardware. Back in the days of the Super Nintendo, there were different standards of frame rates, the PAL standard and the NTSC standard. To cut a long story short, these differences affect the fastest possible achievable lap times on Super Mario Kart.
Below, I present to you the current world record for the PAL version of Super Mario Kart’s Mario Circuit 1. I am quite jealous!
